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Electronic Structure of LK-99
"Electronic structure of the putative room-temperature superconductor [ Pb_9 Cu( PO_4)_6 O ]" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00676 :
> A recent paper [Lee {\em et al.}, J. Korean Cryt. Growth Cryst. Techn. {\bf 33}, 61 (2023)] provides some experimental indications that Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O with x≈1, coined LK-99, might be a room-temperature superconductor at ambient pressure. Our density-functional theory calculations show lattice parameters and a volume contraction with x -- very similar to experiment. The DFT electronic structure shows Cu2+ in a 3d9 configuration with two extremely flat Cu bands crossing the Fermi energy. This puts Pb9Cu(PO4)6O in an ultra-correlated regime and suggests that, without doping, it is a Mott or charge transfer insulator. If doped such an electronic structure might support flat-band superconductivity or an correlation-enhanced electron-phonon mechanism, whereas a diamagnet without superconductivity appears to be rather at odds with our results.
Superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity
Superconductor classification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor_classification
Room-temperature superconductor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto...
Diamagnetism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism
So theorically they agree with LK-99 reaching superconductivity?
More specifically they agree with another similar paper from Stanford's Sinead Griffin
"Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in copper-substituted lead phosphate apatite" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 :
> Abstract: A recent report of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted apatite (`LK99') has invigorated interest in the understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition temperatures in already established families of superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system. Finally, I discuss the implications of my results on possible superconductivity in Cu-doped apatite
Low-cost additive turns concrete slabs into super-fast energy storage
From "Low-cost additive turns concrete slabs into super-fast energy storage" (2023) https://newatlas.com/architecture/mit-concrete-supercapacito... :
> But the great thing here is that this energy storage device doesn't need to be small; concrete tends to get used in bulk. An average American 2,000-sq-ft (185.8-m2) home built on a reasonably standard five-inch-thick (13-cm) concrete slab uses about 31 cubic yards (~24 m3) of concrete. Add more if you've got a driveway or a concreted garage, and significantly more again if the house is built using concrete walls or columns.
> The MIT team says a 1,589-cu-ft (45 m3) block of nanocarbon black-doped concrete will store around 10 kWh of electricity – enough to cover around a third of the power consumption of the average American home, or to reduce your grid energy bill close to zero in conjunction with a decent-sized solar rooftop array. What's more, it would add little to no cost.
> The team has tested these concrete supercaps at small scale, cutting out pairs of electrodes to create tiny 1-volt supercapacitors about the size of button-cell batteries, and using three of them to light up a 3-volt LED. Now, it's working on blocks the size of car batteries, and targeting a 1,589-cu-ft, 10-kWh version for a larger-scale demonstration.
"Carbon–cement supercapacitors as a scalable bulk energy storage solution" (2023) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2304318120
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35903823 :
>> Here's a discussion about the lower costs of hemp supercapacitors as compared with graphene super capacitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16814022
FWIU, Heat-treated hemp bast fiber is comparable to graphene electrodes, and at least was far less costly because bast fiber is otherwise a waste output (and graphene at least was hazardous to produce and doesn't have a natural dendritic branch structure).
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast" (2013) https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp... :
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
> MIT's discovery appears to take things to the next level, since it does away with the need to lay mesh electrodes into the concrete, and instead allows the carbon black to form its own connected electrode structures as part of the curing process.
> This process takes advantage of the way that water and cement react together; the water forms a branching network of channels in the concrete as it starts to harden, and the carbon black naturally migrates into those channels. These channels exhibit a fractal-like structure, larger branches splitting off into smaller and smaller ones – and that creates carbon electrodes with an extremely large surface area, running throughout the concrete.
“…it's unclear whether this kind of concrete would be suitable for outdoor use where it'll get wet.”
Pretty much all concrete used in building a house — especially the slab or basement — will get wet so that renders this idea moot for storing power for a home.
"Does rebar rust?" (2019) https://youtu.be/PLF18H9JGHs
A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing the beginnings of a technological transformation era much like when the p-n junction was invented. From the 1940s standpoint it would be hard to envision all we had today.
- Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.
Can I have my flying car now?
> Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.
Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.
Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground)
Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat.
From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 :
> "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
>> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
BHP says battery electric cheaper than hydrogen as it dumps diesel
I thought this sentence at the end was quite interesting:
> BHP’s modelling shows that battery charging time may be the biggest cost on the electric side, something that dynamic charging can reduce significantly.
For an industry like mining, the biggest cost of switching to electric isn’t buying vehicles, or batteries or setting up charging stations: it’s the downtime they experience while charging.
Very interesting. Makes me imagine a battery swapping station for a huge mining truck. Probably not feasible but I’m sure it would look awesome if it was.
They have hybrid test trucks that can power themselves via overhead lines for the uphill loaded portion of the trip. I wonder if something like that could reduce battery usage and time to charge.
That makes a lot of sense.
I went in a road trip in our EV yesterday pulling a trailer for the first time. We basically drove down into a valley in the morning, and back up out in the evening. As you could imagine, we got basically infinity range going downhill, and much much shorter range going uphill.
A track that powered/charged mining trucks while they were hauling material up, coupled with regenerative breaking seems like it could pretty much solve charging for that application.
Even better, many BHP iron sites in the Pilbarra are mesa mining .. they drive up unloaded and roll down with 100+ tonnes - plenty of opportunity to gravity charge while retarding downhill motion (free wheeling a laden HaulPak down a mesa doesn't end well).
That’s the principal behind Fortescue’s infinity train:
https://newatlas.com/transport/fortescue-wae-infinity-train-...
Regenerative braking in trains: https://www.google.com/search?q=regenerative+braking+trains
Regenerative braking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_braking
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27579732 :
> In Scandinavia the Kiruna to Narvik electrified railway [...] The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border
Is re-planning routes for regenerative braking solvable with the Modified Snow Plow Problem (variation on TSP Traveling Salesman Problem), on a QC Quantum Computer; with Quantum Algorithmic advantage due to the complexity of the problem?
From "Snow plow routing problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_plow_routing_problem :
> The snow plow routing problem is an application of the structure of Arc Routing Problems (ARPs) and Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) to snow removal that considers roads as edges of a graph.
> The problem is a simple routing problem when the arrival times are not specified.[1] Snow plow problems consider constraints such as the cost of plowing downhill compared to plowing uphill.[2] The Mixed Chinese Postman Problem is applicable to snow routes where directed edges represent one-way streets and undirected edges represent two-way streets. [3]
Arc routing > Algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_routing#Algorithms :
> Finding an efficient solution with large amounts data to the Chinese Postman Problem (CPP), the Windy Postman Problem (WPP), the Rural Postman Problem (RPP), the k-Chinese postman problem (KCPP), the mixed Chinese postman problem (MCPP), the Directed Chinese Postman Problem (DCPP),[8] the Downhill Plowing Problem (DPP), the Plowing with Precedence Problem (PPP), the Windy Rural Postman Problem (WRPP) and the Windy General Routing Problem (WGRP) requires using thoughtful mathematical concepts, including heuristic optimization methods, branch-and-bound methods, integer linear programming, and applications of traveling salesman problem algorithms such as the Held–Karp algorithm makes an improvement from O(n!) to O(2^{n}n^{2}).[9] In addition to these algorithms, these classes of problems can also be solved with the cutting plane algorithm, convex optimization, convex hulls, Lagrange multipliers and other dynamic programming methods. In cases where it is not feasible to run the Held–Karp algorithm because of its high computational complexity, algorithms like this can be used to approximate the solution in a reasonable amount of time.[10]
QC algos for TSP and similar:
- QISkit tutorials > Max-Cut and Traveling Salesman Problem: docs/tutorials/06_examples_max_cut_and_tsp.ipynb: https://qiskit.org/ecosystem/optimization/tutorials/06_examp...
Solar Powered Conways Game of Life
Neat. Can it zoom out instead of wrapping around?
From "Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33799981 :
> From "Convolution Is Fancy Multiplication" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25194658 :
>> FWIW, (bounded) Conway's Game of Life can be efficiently implemented as a convolution of the board state: https://gist.github.com/mikelane/89c580b7764f04cf73b32bf4e94... ; scipy.ndimage.convolve
> Conway's Game is a 2D convolution
> Convolution theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_theorem
Conway's Game of Life > Algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Algori...
Rosetta Code > Conway's Game of Life: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
scipy.ndimage.convolve / scipy.fftpack.dct*
From https://github.com/thearn/game-of-life :
> How it's written
> The game grid is encoded as a simple m by n array (default 100x100 in the code) of zeros and ones. In each program, a state transition is determined for each pixel by looking at the 8 pixel values all around it, and counting how many of them are "alive", then applying some rules based that number. Since the "alive" or "dead" states are just encoded as 1 or 0, this is equivalent to summing up the values of all 8 neighbors.
> If you want to do this for all pixels in a single shot, this is equivalent to computing the 2D convolution between the game state array and the matrix [[1,1,1],[1,0,1],[1,1,1]]. Convolution is an operation that basically applies that matrix as a "stencil" at every position around the game grid array, and sums up the values according to the values in that stencil. And convolution can be very efficiently computed using the FFT, thanks to the Fourier Convolution Theorem.
> One side effect: the convolution using FFT implicitly involves periodic boundary conditions, so the game grid is "wrapped" around itself (like in Pacman, or Mario Bros. 2). If you wanted to change this, you would just have to modify the 2D convolution function to use an orthogonal form of the DCT instead of the FFT. This would correspond to "hard" (i.e. Dirichlet) boundary conditions on the convolution operator.
> I think you could do this with scipy using the 1D orthogonal dct provided:
from scipy import fftpack
fftpack.dct(data, norm='ortho')
The (Inverse) Quantum Fourier Transform is also applied in QC; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform#Defi...
Conway's Game of Life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
Solar power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power
E Ink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink
I am just curious, but what do you feel defining these three common terms, surely all well known to anyone who'd read HN, adds to the discussion?
Links are edges. When there are URL links, there are better edges that cost less to find than NLP tasks like conceptual entity recognition.
Because I've added edges from hn_uri to wikipedia_uris; I, others, and search engines could discover the hn_uris relevant to the concept URIs (by graph pattern search)
W3C SPARQL is a graph pattern query language. Some triple graph patterns enabled by there being links in the comments here in HN:
?s ?p ?o.
?s linksTo ?o.
?s linksTo <wikipedia_uri> .
Single Atom Pd Catalyst Could Cut Methane Pollution 90% from Millions of Engines
"Single Atom Catalyst Could Cut Methane Pollution 90% From Millions of Engines" (2023) https://scitechdaily.com/single-atom-catalyst-could-cut-meth... :
> [...] Individual palladium atoms attached to the surface of a catalyst can remove 90% of unburned methane from natural-gas engine exhaust at low temperatures, scientists reported on July 20 in the journal Nature Catalysis.
> While more research needs to be done, they said, the advance in single-atom catalysis has the potential to lower exhaust emissions of methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases, which traps heat at about 25 times the rate of carbon dioxide.
> Promising Results Across Engine Operation Temperatures
> Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Washington State University showed that the catalyst removed methane from engine exhaust at both the lower temperatures where engines start up and the higher temperatures where they operate most efficiently, but where catalysts often break down.
"Dynamic and reversible transformations of subnanometre-sized palladium on ceria for efficient methane removal" (2023) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-023-00983-8
Methane emissions > Removal technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions#Removal_tech...
Palladium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium
See also:
- "Add-on [AGR] device makes home furnaces cleaner, safer and longer-lasting" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926952 :
> [...] removes more than 99.9% of acidic gases and other emissions to produce an ultraclean natural gas furnace.
Add-on device makes home furnaces cleaner, safer and longer-lasting
"Add-on device makes home furnaces cleaner, safer and longer-lasting" (2023) https://www.ornl.gov/news/add-device-makes-home-furnaces-cle... :
> [...] Even modern high-efficiency condensing furnaces produce significant amounts of corrosive acidic condensation and unhealthy levels of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and methane. These emissions are typically vented into the atmosphere and end up polluting our soil, water and air.
> Now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an affordable add-on technology that removes more than 99.9% of acidic gases and other emissions to produce an ultraclean natural gas furnace. This acidic gas reduction, or AGR, technology can also be added to other natural gas-driven equipment such as water heaters, commercial boilers and industrial furnaces.
> “Just as catalytic converters help reduce emissions from billions of vehicles worldwide, the new AGR technology can virtually eliminate problematic greenhouse gases and acidic condensation produced by today’s new and existing residential gas furnaces,” said Zhiming Gao, staff researcher with ORNL’s Energy Science and Technology Directorate. “An eco-friendly condensate eliminates the need to use corrosion-resistant stainless steel materials for furnace heat exchangers, which reduces manufacturing costs.”
"Nondestructive neutron imaging diagnosis of acidic gas reduction catalyst after 400-Hour operation in natural gas furnace" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13858...
See also:
- "Single Atom [Palladium] Catalyst Could Cut Methane Pollution 90% from Millions of Engines" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926784
Blockchain company is granted a patent for a room-temperature superconductor
Ooh high temperature superconductors are in the news how can we work this into a crypto grift?
LPython: Novel, Fast, Retargetable Python Compiler
Looks very interesting ! The authors talk about Numba, but does anyone know how it would compare to Codon ? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33908576)
edit: after trying quickly, it seems that lpython really requires type annotations everywhere, while codon is more permissive (or does type inference)
I would say LPython, Codon, Mojo and Taichi are structured similarly as compilers written in C++, see the links at the bottom of https://lpython.org/.
Internally they each parse the syntax to AST, then have some kind of an intermediate representation (IR), do some optimizations and generate code. The differences are in the details of the IR and how the compiler is internally structured.
Regarding the type inference, this is for a blog post on its own. See this issue for now: https://github.com/lcompilers/lpython/issues/2168, roughly speaking, there is implicit typing (inference), implicit declarations and implicit casting. Rust disallows implicit declarations and casting, but allows implicit typing. As shown in that issue they only meant to do single line implicit typing, but (by a mistake?) allowed multi-statements implicit typing (action at a distance). LPython currently does not allow any implicit typing (type inference). As documented at the issue, the main problem with implicit typing is that there is no good syntax in CPython that would allow explicit type declaration but implicit typing. Typically you get both implicit declaration and implicit typing, say in `x = 5`, this both declares `x` as a new variable as well as types it as integer. C++ and Rust does not allow implicit declarations (you have to use `auto` or `let` keywords) and I think we should not do either. We could do something like `x: var = 5`, but at that point you might as well just do `x: i32 = 5`, use the actual type instead of `var`.
Shedskin is a Python-to-C++ transpiler that does type inference and does not support the full standard library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shed_Skin#Type_inference
From "Show HN: Python Tests That Write Themselves" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21012133:
> pytype (Google) [1], PyAnnotate (Dropbox) [2], and MonkeyType (Instagram) [3] all do dynamic / runtime PEP-484 type annotation type inference [4]
Hypothesis (@given decorator tests) also does type inference IIUC? https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
icontract and pycontracts do runtime Preconditions and Postconditions with Design-by-Contract patterns similar to Eiffel DbC; they check the types and values of arguments passed while the program in running and not just at coding or compile time.
Yes, we have Shedskin in the list at the bottom of https://lpython.org/. Note that the Shedskin compiler is written in Python, so the speed of compilation might be lower than other Python compilers written in C++. Unless it compiles itself, that would be interesting. We thought about eventually writing LPython in LPython, but for now we are focusing on delivering, so we are sticking to C++.
Can LPython transpile existing Python type inference libraries written in Python to C++?
Only if the libraries used the subset of Python that LPython can compile. So currently no.
Intent to approve PEP 703: making the GIL optional
Lots of C library code for decades carried man page warnings it was unstable for use in async, re-entrant and recursive contexts. We learned how to cope and incrementally re-entrant safe versions deployed without too much API instability. Maybe time has healed wounds and caused me memory loss of the pain of discovery you'd tripped over them.
String parsing which tokenised in-place. DNS calls which used static buffers. Things which exploited Vax specific stack behaviour.
I think the GIL has been a blessing and a curse.
While I'm happy to see optional GIL approved and happening,
I also suspect that the GIL has saved us from debugging reentrant and/or dangerously concurrent code for years, and I salute the GIL for forcing us to build Arrow for IPC in Python, in particular.
Someday, URI attributes in CPython docstrings might specify which functions are constant time, non re-entrant, functions.
Reentrancy (computing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reentrancy_(computing)
Global Interpreter Lock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_interpreter_lock
An ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotls regrow limbs
From TA https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2023/07/26/how-an-ultra-sensi... :
> Axolotls, they discovered, have an ultra-sensitive version of mTOR, a molecule that acts as an on-off switch for protein production. And, like survivalists who fill their basements with non-perishable food for hard times, axolotl cells stockpile messenger RNA molecules, which contain genetic instructions for producing proteins. The combination of an easily activated mTOR molecule and a repository of ready-to-use mRNAs means that after an injury, axolotl cells can quickly produce the proteins needed for tissue regeneration.
From "Reactivating Dormant Cells in the Retina Brings New Hope for Vision Regeneration" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35871887 :
> "Direct neuronal reprogramming by temporal identity factors" (2023) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122168120#abstract :
> Abstract: Temporal identity factors are sufficient to reprogram developmental competence of neural progenitors and shift cell fate output, but whether they can also reprogram the identity of terminally differentiated cells is unknown. To address this question, we designed a conditional gene expression system that allows rapid screening of potential reprogramming factors in mouse retinal glial cells combined with genetic lineage tracing. Using this assay, we found that coexpression of the early temporal identity transcription factors Ikzf1 and Ikzf4 is sufficient to directly convert Müller glial (MG) cells into cells that translocate to the outer nuclear layer (ONL), where photoreceptor cells normally reside. We name these “induced ONL (iONL)” cells. Using genetic lineage tracing, histological, immunohistochemical, and single-cell transcriptome and multiome analyses, we show that expression of Ikzf1/4 in MG in vivo, without retinal injury, mostly generates iONL cells that share molecular characteristics with bipolar cells, although a fraction of them stain for Rxrg, a cone photoreceptor marker. Furthermore, we show that coexpression of Ikzf1 and Ikzf4 can reprogram mouse embryonic fibroblasts to induced neurons in culture by rapidly remodeling chromatin and activating a neuronal gene expression program. This work uncovers general neuronal reprogramming properties for temporal identity factors in terminally differentiated cells.
>> Is it possible to produce or convert Müller glial cells with Nanotransfection (stroma reprogramming), too?
Muller glial cells and mTOR: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&as_vi... :
- "Genetic and epigenetic regulators of retinal Müller glial cell reprogramming" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266737622... :
> A number of factors have been identified as the important regulators in Müller glial cell reprogramming. The early response of Müller glial cells upon acute retinal injury, such as the regulation in the exit from quiescent state, the initiation of reactive gliosis, and the re-entry of cell cycle of Müller glial cells, displays significant difference between mouse and zebrafish, which may be mediated by the diverse regulation of Notch and TGFβ (transforming growth factor-β) isoforms and different chromatin accessibility.
From "Fiber-infused ink enables 3D-printed heart muscle to beat" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36894749 https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2023/07/fiber-infused-ink-enab... :
> In a paper published in Nature Materials, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) report the development of a new hydrogel ink infused with gelatin fibers that enables 3D printing of a functional heart ventricle that mimics beating like a human heart. They discovered the fiber-infused gel (FIG) ink allows heart muscle cells printed in the shape of a ventricle to align and beat in coordination like a human heart chamber.
> “People have been trying to replicate organ structures and functions to test drug safety and efficacy as a way of predicting what might happen in the clinical setting,” says Suji Choi, research associate at SEAS and first author on the paper. But until now, 3D printing techniques alone have not been able to achieve physiologically-relevant alignment of cardiomyocytes, the cells responsible for transmitting electrical signals in a coordinated fashion to contract heart muscle.
Hydrogel and gelatin.
Regenerative medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_medicine
Regeneration in humans > Induced regeneration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans#Induced...
Adding clean energy to the US power grid just got a lot easier
From TA https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/28/23811031/ferc-renewable-e... :
> As it is now, it takes an average of five years for a new energy project to connect to the grid. There’s a huge backlog of more than 2,000 gigawatts of clean energy generation and storage that’s just waiting in line for approval. That’s about as much capacity as the nation’s existing power plants have for generating electricity today.
> [...] To clear the backlog, the new federal rule will require grid managers to assess projects in clusters instead of one at a time. They’ll also face firm deadlines and penalties for failing to finish interconnection studies on time. The new rule prioritizes projects that are the farthest along in development and also includes new requirements for project developers, like financial deposits to discourage them from proposing projects that might not pull through.
Also from TA:
> Today, renewable energy makes up just over 20 percent of the US electricity mix. A five-year wait time isn’t going to cut it if the Biden administration wants to reach its goal of achieving a 100 percent clean power grid by 2035. Added capacity would also come in handy during sweltering heatwaves like those of this summer, when electricity demand spikes for air conditioning. Two of the nation’s largest grid operators issued alerts about potential energy shortages for that reason this week.
From "Computer simulation provides 4k scenarios for a climate turnaround" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36578412 :
> Highlights:
> • Probabilistic assessment of 4000 decarbonisation pathways with the ETSAP-TIAM.
> • Delaying the action for the 2 °C target costs similar to acting now for the 1.5 °C.
> • Demand electrification is higher in 2050 than today in all model runs.
> • Hydrogen is used in 99% of the model runs to meet the 1.5 °C target.
Why SQLite does not use Git (2018)
I'm glad Fossil works for them, but this line is bothered me:
> In contrast, Fossil is a single standalone binary which is installed by putting it on $PATH. That one binary contains all the functionality of core Git and also GitHub and/or GitLab. It manages a community server with wiki, bug tracking, and forums, provides packaged downloads for consumers, login managements, and so forth, with no extra software required
git, for all its issues, is not bundling the kitchen sink. I do prefer the "do one thing and do it well" approach.
Git actually is bundling a lot of stuff you probably don't realize. Run 'git instaweb' for example and it will spin up a local CGI server and perl CGI script to give a very simple web UI: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-instaweb Fossil isn't much different in core functionality here.
There is a ton of email client integration and functionality in git too that most people who only use GitHub probably have absolutely no idea exists or even why it's there. Stuff like sending email patches right from git: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-send-email
FWIW, that isn't actually part of the core git binary. Because unlike fossil, git is a collection of executables, not just one.
Yes, which is why git is a pain in the butt to install and you have to rely on your OS packages (which includes all the kitchen sink stuff) or a GUI installer with all the necessary dependencies vs. Fossil which is just download executable and done.
Securing the software supply chain for software updaters and VCS systems means PKI and/or key distribution, cryptographic hashes and signatures, file manifests with per-archive-file checksums, and DAC extended filesystem attributes for installed files; Ironically, there's more to it than just `curl`'ing a binary into place and not remembering to update it.
And that is why package managers.
And sigstore; for centralized software artifact (package,) hashes: https://sigstore.dev/
Wireless charging technique boosts long-distance efficiency to 80%
Does wireless power transmission increase atmospheric heat; adversely affect climate change?
Wireless power transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer
First time I read about it, so also the actual QI wireless charging should increase the atmospheric heat?
Anyway the current wireless charging is less efficient, and the “dispersed” power is transformed into heat, so yes, it’s always less environment friendly. The numbers of dispersed power are very small but on a very big scale.
Space-based solar power > Safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Safety :
> At the Earth's surface, a suggested microwave beam would have a maximum intensity at its center, of 23 mW/cm2 (less than 1/4 the solar irradiation constant), and an intensity of less than 1 mW/cm2 outside the rectenna fenceline (the receiver's perimeter).[91] These compare with current United States Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) workplace exposure limits for microwaves, which are 10 mW/cm2
If the beam intensity is lower than than the solar irradiation constant, what is the advantage over terrestrial solar/TPV?
I think that intensity could heat a metal object?
Is all of the inefficiency of wireless power transfer systems due to thermal conversion/loss?
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
Room-temperature superconductor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto...
Superconducting quantum computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_comput...
AI/ML development, training and inference using Python and Jupyter
We Just Published a AI/ML development Kit on AWS, This VM comes with the setup & installation for collaborative development, training & inference of AI-ML models using Jupyter notebook, python libraries & NVIDIA Cuda drivers. Check it Out.
"Python Machine Learning (3rd Ed.) " https://github.com/rasbt/python-machine-learning-book-3rd-ed...
Vscode.dev: Local Development with Cloud Tools
FYI – you can go to github.dev (or press "." while browsing any repository) to get the same VS Code online experience, additionally with the repo automatically loaded into it.
Something else I find very confusing is that vscode.dev & github.dev are both free and run the editor fully locally in your browser. Github Codespaces on the other hand provisions a VM behind the scenes so you can run containers, build tooling and whatever else alongside the editor. That one charges by the hour.
github.dev now has a "Continue With..." call-to-action which spins up a Codespace, so that differentiates it a bit.
From https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/1086#issue... :
vscode://vscode.git/clone?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FMicrosoft%2Fvscode-vsce.git
vscode://file/path/to/file/file.ext:55:20
vscode://file/path/to/project/
https://vscode.dev/github/organization/repo
https://vscode.dev/azurerepos/organization/project/repo
Fancy quartz countertops are killing people who make them, doctors say
I’m curious whether quartzite carries the same risk? They only mention marble and granite as having a lower health risk
Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer Implemented in PyTorch
"Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08621 https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2307.08621/ https://huggingface.co/papers/2307.08621 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=Ret...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831956 2 days ago
ElKaWe – Electrocaloric heat pumps
Natural refrigerant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_refrigerant :
> Natural refrigerants are considered substances that serve as refrigerants in refrigeration systems (including refrigerators, HVAC, and air conditioning). They are alternatives to synthetic refrigerants such as chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) based refrigerants. Unlike other refrigerants, natural refrigerants can be found in nature and are commercially available thanks to physical industrial processes like fractional distillation, chemical reactions such as Haber process and spin-off gases. The most prominent of these include various natural hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water.[1] Natural refrigerants are preferred actually in new equipment to their synthetic counterparts for their presumption of higher degrees of sustainability. With the current technologies available, almost 75 percent of the refrigeration and air conditioning sector has the potential to be converted to natural refrigerants
Edit
Heat pump and refrigeration cycle > Thermodynamic cycles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cy... :
> According to the second law of thermodynamics, heat cannot spontaneously flow from a colder location to a hotter area; work is required to achieve this.[3] An air conditioner requires work to cool a living space, moving heat from the interior being cooled (the heat source) to the outdoors (the heat sink). Similarly, a refrigerator moves heat from inside the cold icebox (the heat source) to the warmer room-temperature air of the kitchen (the heat sink). The operating principle of an ideal heat engine was described mathematically using the Carnot cycle by Sadi Carnot in 1824. An ideal refrigerator or heat pump can be thought of as an ideal heat engine that is operating in a reverse Carnot cycle.[4]
> Heat pump cycles and refrigeration cycles can be classified as vapor compression, vapor absorption, gas cycle, or Stirling cycle types.
Heat pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump :
> [...] When in heating mode, a refrigerant at the warmer temperature is compressed, becoming hot. Its thermal energy can be transferred to the cooler space. After being returned to the warmer space the refrigerant is decompressed — evaporated. It has delivered some of its thermal energy, so returns colder than the environment, and can again take up energy from the air or the ground in the warm space, and repeat the cycle.
> Air source heat pumps are the most common models, while other types include ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps. Large-scale heat pumps are also used in district heating systems.[2]
> The efficiency of a heat pump is expressed as a coefficient of performance (COP), or seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP). The higher the number, the more efficient a heat pump is. When used for space heating, heat pumps are typically much more energy-efficient than electric resistance and other heaters. Because of their high efficiency and the increasing share of fossil-free sources in electrical grids, heat pumps can play a key role in climate change mitigation.[3][4] Consuming 1 kWh of electricity, they can transfer 3 to 6 kWh of thermal energy into a building.[5] The carbon footprint of heat pumps depends on how electricity is generated, but they usually reduce emissions in mild climates.[6] Heat pumps could satisfy over 80% of global space and water heating needs with a lower carbon footprint than gas-fired condensing boilers: however, in 2021 they only met 10%.[7]
>> [...] When in heating mode, a refrigerant at the warmer temperature is compressed, becoming hot. Its thermal energy can be transferred to the cooler space. After being returned to the warmer space the refrigerant is decompressed — evaporated. It has delivered some of its thermal energy, so returns colder than the environment, and can again take up energy from the air or the ground in the warm space, and repeat the cycle.
Great to see that even Wikipedia struggles with this :-)
This is 100% wrong.
Transferring heat from a warm space to a cold space happens on its own and does not need a heat pump. In the contrary, you can even extract mechanical work from this process.
Heating mode means heating a warm space by transferring heat from a colder space, which requires work.
If you convert all of the local thermal gradient to electricity, there's no work left to do without a pressure gradient in the loop or passive exchange to keep a thermal gradient there?
According to Superfluid Quantum Gravity, black holes and the quantum foam have a gravitational pressure gradient; vortices given density.
Stem Formulas
Clean!
I submitted the first formula that popped into my head from uni years ago: the Generalised Linear Model definition from one of the later stats courses
This project vaguely reminds me of Gradshteyn and Ryzhik (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradshteyn_and_Ryzhik)
Rosetta Code: https://rosettacode.org/
> Complexity Zoo > Petting Zoo > {P, NP, PP,}, Modeling Computation > Deterministic Turing Machine https://complexityzoo.net/Petting_Zoo#Deterministic_Turing_M...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31719696 :
> Fixed-point combinator > Y Combinator, Implementations in other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator
> Y-combinator in like 100 languages: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Y_combinator #Python
Quantum Algorithm Zoo by Microsoft Quantum: https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-30784573 :
> Quantum Monte Carlo,
QFT and iQFT; Inverted Quantum Fourier Transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform
From "Common Lisp names all sixteen binary logic gates" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32804463 :
- Quantum_logic
The matrix representations of quantum gates and operators are neat too; https://www.google.com/search?q=matrix+representations+of+qu...
Lean mathlib may already have the proofs for many of these Stem Formulas (in LaTeX)? These formulas as SymPy would also be useful.
latex2sympy parses LaTeX and generates SymPy symbolic CAS Python code (w/ ANTLR) and is now merged in SymPy core but you must install ANTLR before because it's an optional dependency. Then, sympy.lambdify will compile a symbolic expression for use with TODO JAX, TensorFlow, PyTorch,.
"Ask HN: Did studying proof based math topics make you a better programmer?" Re: lean mathlib https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36463580
[Mathematics in mathlib > A mathlib overview]( https://leanprover-community.github.io/mathlib-overview.html )
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159017 :
> sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :
>> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPy, numexpr,]*
From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19084622 :
> "latex2sympy parses LaTeX math expressions and converts it into the equivalent SymPy form" and is now merged into SymPy master and callable with sympy.parsing.latex.parse_latex(). It requires antlr-python-runtime to be installed. https://github.com/augustt198/latex2sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13706
ENH: 'generate a Jupyter notebook' (nbformat .ipynb JSON) function from this stem formula
ENH: Store/export Stem formula attributes as JSON-LD Linked Data and/or RDFa (RDF in HTML Attributes) .
JSON-LD Playground has examples of JSON-LD, as does https://schema.org/CreativeWork : https://json-ld.org/playground/
Pending are the schema.org RDFS vocabulary MathSolver class and mathExpression property: https://schema.org/MathSolver and https://schema.org/mathExpression
Dbpedia has wikipedia infobox attributes as RDF.
IDK if there's an RDF interface to Wolfram?
ENH: Generate search urls from formula names
Computational Chemistry Using PyTorch
I tried using this last year or the year before. Ended up using DeepChem instead https://github.com/deepchem/deepchem.
That said, I’ve found RDKit to be the singularly most useful toolkit in this area.
Tequila wraps Psi4, Madness, and/or PySCF for Quantum Chemistry with Expectation Values: https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantumchemistry
Vimspector – the Vim debugger rules all
The actual title is "Vimspector - A multi-language debugging plugin for Vim".
It is a UI around DAP: https://github.com/puremourning/vimspector#what-vimspector-i...
Microsoft made LSP and it does DAP, both are really useful for coders.
In fact even GDB added DAP support recently: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GDB-Debug-Adapter-Protocol
Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?
Probably disappointing to the authors but an excellent rebuttal.
This is the sort of mistake that's awfully easy to make in ML. The unfortunate thing about the field is that subtle methodological errors often cause subtle failures rather than catastrophic failures as we're used to in many other branches of engineering or science. You can easily make a system slightly worse or slightly better by contaminating your training set with bad data or accidentally leaking some information about your target and the ML system will take it in stride (but with slightly contaminated results).
This result makes sense to me because as much as I would like it to be true, applying existing compression algorithms to ML feels like too much of a "free lunch". If there was any special magic happening in compression algorithms we'd use compression algorithms as encoders instead of using transformers as compressors.
It's true in many experiments. The desire to get the result you want can often overwhelm the need to validate what you are getting.
Especially true when the results confirm any pre-existing thinking you may have.
Yep, confirmation bias. Luckily helped with peer review!
Hasn’t this paper made it through peer review?
Yeah it was published at ACL ( https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.426/ ) which is one of the most prestigious conferences in NLP. So kinda disappointing.
But paper reviewers are usually not supposed to look at the actual source code of the papers, and definitely don't try to reproduce the results. They just read the paper itself, which of course doesn't talk about the error.
Not sure what the best solution is, other than having the most "hyped" papers double verified by researchers on Twitter.
Yeah, it’s not (entirely) the students’ faults that this slipped through peer review. I don’t envy the whiplash they’re going to experience over the next few weeks.
If I was the graduate chair of their department I might schedule a meeting with their supervisor to sort out how this happened.
What about the difference in CPU cost, RAM cost, and GPU training hours, though? What about the comparative Big-E's of the models?
Great topic: Model minification and algorithmic omplexity
These are good research topics, but then you really need to be comparing to other models in the same class.
The only other super cheap model they compare with is FastText, and FastText beat them quite substantially.
Cython 3.0 Released
From https://cython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/changes.html#com... :
> Since Cython 3.0.0 started development, CPython 3.8-3.11 were released. All these are supported in Cython, including experimental support for the in-development CPython 3.12
A PostgreSQL Docker container that automatically upgrades your database
This looks useful.
I've had issues in the past with PostgreSQL as a backend for NextCloud (all running in docker) and blindly pulling the latest PostgreSQL and then wondering why it didn't work when the major version jumped. (It's easy enough to fix once you figure out why it's not running - just do a manual export from the previous version and import the data into the newer version).
However, does this container automatically backup the data before upgrading in case you discover that the newer version isn't compatible with whatever is using it?
> However, does this container automatically backup the data before upgrading ...
Nope. This container is the official Docker Postgres 15.3-alpine3.18 image + the older versions of PostgreSQL compiled into it and some pg_upgrade scripting added to the docker entrypoint script to run the upgrade before starting PostgreSQL.
It goes out of it's way to use the "--link" option when running pg_upgrade, to upgrade in-place and therefore avoid making an additional copy of the data.
That being said, this is a pretty new project (about a week old on GitHub), and having some support for making an (optional) backup isn't a bad idea.
I'll have to think on a good way to make that work. Probably needs to check for some environment variable as a toggle or something, for the people who want it... (unsure yet).
Seems def interesting to handle backup, wonder if could just be something simple enough that lets you downgrade if upgrade fails
Yeah. Probably going to need to add a bunch more error catching and handling-of-specific-situations. Edge cases being a thing and all. :)
Chapter 26. Backup and Restore: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/backup.html
Chapter 26. Backup and Restore > 26.3. Continuous Archiving and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) > 26.3.4. Recovering Using a Continuous Archive Backup: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/continuous-archiving...
IIRC there are fancier ways than pg_dump to do Postgres backups that aren't postgres native PITR?
gh topic postgresql-backup: https://github.com/topics/postgresql-backup
- pgsql-backup.sh: https://github.com/fukawi2/pgsql-backup/blob/develop/src/pgs...
- https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/pgkit#backup https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/pgkit/blob/main/pgkit/cli/co... :
$ sudo pgkit pitr backup <name> <delay>
$ sudo pgkit pitr recover <name> <time>
$ sudo pgkit pitr recover <name> latest
- "PostgreSQL-Disaster-Recovery-With-Barman" https://github.com/softwarebrahma/PostgreSQL-Disaster-Recove... :
> The solution architecture chosen here is a 'Traditional backup with WAL streaming' architecture implementation (Backup via rsync/SSH + WAL streaming). This is chosen as it provides incremental backup/restore & a bunch of other features.
Glossary of backup terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_backup_terms
Continuous Data Protection > Continuous vs near continuous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Data_Protection#Con...
Thanks. I hadn't come across pgkit before. :)
A default option is to warn about the possibility and then just leave the admins to do their own backups (which they should be doing anyway).
What do you reckon the right place(s) to warn people would be?
As an interactive prompt before mutating the data, with a `-y` to bypass the interactive check (and in the docs for `-y`)
Nah. I can't see anything that needs interaction as being workable, as this is supposed to be an "automatic upgrade" thing.
New study gives clues on why exercise helps with inflammation
Exercise powers the lymphatic system which increases the rate at which wastes are removed from tissues.
Exercise correlates with subsequent increased levels of endocannabinoids.
"The anti-inflammatory effect of bacterial short chain fatty acids is partially mediated by endocannabinoids" (2021) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2021.1... https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/exercise-lowers-in...
"The Endocannabinoid System and Physical Exercise" (2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9916354/
What are the relations between exercise and diet (and [health] conscientiousness)?
/? Omega 6:3 ratio (and inflammation): https://www.google.com/search?q=omega+6+3+ratio
A third of North America’s birds have vanished
One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning".
Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy).
What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:
1. Regular Individuals like me e.g. "build a bird-friendly yard"
2. Influential individuals like architects, urban planners,
3. Small groups, e.g. birdwatchers, Boy Scouts, churches, schools
4. Small towns & neighborhoods, e.g. "build bird friendly parks"
All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
"Bird-friendly yard" is probably the most counterproductive of these. Habitat loss is far and away the biggest problem that birds face. Anyone having a yard is the problem. People must learn to congregate in compact development forms and leave the land for the animals, if they care about having animals.
Probably the only easy life change individuals can do is not eat meat and not buy ethanol. That would return tons of land to natural uses.
"Air pollution particles may be cause of dramatic drop in global insect numbers" (2023) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230712124747.h... :
> Researchers report that an insect's ability to find food and a mate is reduced when their antennae are contaminated by particulate matter from industry, transport, bushfires, and other sources of air pollution.
So catalytic converters, catalytic combustors, AGR Acidic Gas Reduction, Net Zero homes and vehicles etc. may be pretty impactful.
(In addition to planting and allowing clover and dandelions for the bees; and leaving longer grass for fireflies and ticks and CO2 capture and grasshoppers)
An herbicide that doesn't kill clover would make for prettier lawns; but the non-grass plants in the lawn are the food of the insects, which are the food of the birds.
Building a safer FIDO2 key with privilege separation and WebAssembly
The USB driver itself can not access arbitrary memory. But it may be able to program the DMA controller of the USB peripheral to access arbitrary memory. So the WebAssembly sandboxing of a driver alone is not enough. You still need some hardware mechanism like an SMMU. Or a trusted module that abstracts the DMA controller.
Indeed we thought this would be a challenge and I didn’t explain this aspect in the blog post. But on this chip, DMA is its own peripheral and the DMA peripheral is not used by the USB driver. Instead, the USB peripheral and the main CPU share a small memory region. The USB peripheral is then programmed in terms of offsets into this shared memory region, rather than physical memory addresses—-the USB peripheral does not have access to all of physical memory. This is discussed at the bottom of page 48 of the thesis itself [1].
This saved a lot of trouble, but in intro work on this I was using another chip (nRF52840) that worked the way you describe. To safely handle DMA in that case, without an IOMMU, we had to add somewhat complex reasoning that looked at each memory read and write to see if it was modifying a DMA control register and reject the write if it could lead to unsafe behavior. More info is on pages 52-55 of the thesis PDF.
This was pretty messy, so it was fortunate that the chip we used had a different plan. Let me know if I’m misunderstanding you!
[1]: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/bkettle-meng.pdf#page48
Are there NX pages/flags?
NX bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
Tagged architecture / Memory tagging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_architecture & type unions
Harvard architecture > memory details > Contrast with modified Harvard architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture#Contrast_...
IIUC Ideally there should be an NX bit on pages, registers, names, and/or variables; and the programming language supports it.
(IIRC, with CPython the NX bit doesn't work when any imported C extension has nested functions / trampolines?)
Matrices and Graph
This approach reminds me of RedisGraph[1] (which is now unfortunately EoL).
"RedisGraph is the first queryable Property Graph database to use sparse matrices to represent the adjacency matrix in graphs and linear algebra to query the graph."
RDF-star and SPARQL-star are basically Property Graph interfaces if you don't validate with e.g. RDFS (schema.org,), SHACL, json-ld-schema (jsonschema+shacl), and/or OWL.
Justify Linked Data; https://5stardata.info/
W3C RDF-star and SPARQL-star > 2.2 RDF-star Graph Examples: https://w3c.github.io/rdf-star/cg-spec/editors_draft.html#rd...
def to_matrices(g: rdflib.MultiDiGraph) -> Union[Matrix, Tensor]
Multigraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigraph :
> In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a multigraph is a graph which is permitted to have multiple edges (also called parallel edges[1]), that is, edges that have the same end nodes. Thus two vertices may be connected by more than one edge ... [which requires multidimensional matrices, netcdf (pydata/xarray,), tensors, or a better implementation of a representation; and edge reification in RDF]
From "Why tensors? A beginner's perspective" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30629931 :
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor
... Tensor product of graphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_product_of_graphs
Hilbert space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space :
> The inner product between two state vectors is a complex number known as a probability amplitude.
Ziplm: Gzip-Backed Language Model
> Transformers (GPT-3, Copilot ,) are built upon an expensive self-attention network. Instead or also FFT looks to be 7x GPU-cheaper.
"Google Replaces BERT Self-Attention with Fourier Transform: 92% Accuracy, 7 Times Faster on GPUs" (2021) https://syncedreview.com/2021/05/14/deepmind-podracer-tpu-ba...
The next step of Conway's Game can be calculated with FFT and also 2D Convolution.
Convolution > Visual explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution
"Convolutions / Why X+Y in probability is a beautiful mess" by 3blue1brown https://youtu.be/IaSGqQa5O-M
Google now requires and lists phone number in Play Store listings
What percentage of existing app developers on the Play Store do not have a DUNS number? Do they need to incorporate an LLC in order to get a DUNS number for their open source project?
Google decided to take the first 15% of app developers' first $1M in revenue instead of 30% in 2021. Google decided to take a 30% cut from all Play Store app and in-app revenue, and you may only use Google Payments in your app (just like Apple).
$150,000 out of $1,000,000 is a lot of money to host downloads, comments, and scan APKs. Shopping malls don't even demand a 15%-30% cut of revenue.
F-droid charges $0 to host APK app downloads and comments but doesn't scan APKs IIUC? https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model/
How to donate to F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/donate/
The platform fee of 30% is completely independent from the cost of running the store. The value of the Play store is the reach it provides app developers.
Are there estimates of Play Store cost models and profit margins?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382186 :
>> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:
>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper
> [joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs
But that's for ScholarlyArticles without automated peer review.
(And then they need somewhere else to host their datasets, because journals aren't CDNs. And then they need someone else to host repo2docker container instances or repo2jupyterlite in WASM.)
When I loan my money to a bank, they go invest it and give me like a 1% interest rate.
SUSE is forking RHEL
I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day.
I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so.
The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for because it was some RH specific patch.
Between Debian, Nix, Arch, and others, I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. I'll go as far as to say that my Arch boxes have been far more predictable than my RHEL boxes.
> I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable
RHEL compat per se is irrelevant, it's the 10 years guaranteed maintenance enterprise customers are after, plus a path forward for their third-party software investments only certified on RHEL (because of said guarantees) and internal IT deployment/admin line processes. Despite making the rounds on HN, enterprise and other commercial users give a flying fuck to io_uring, systemd (up until RHEL 7 when they were forced to), namespaces, and other Linux "innovations" which in fact are just annoyances to justify contracts for 30+ years of ongoing maintenance of an age-old POSIX core operating system once developed in a couple of months and praised for its minimalism.
If LTS contracts are that lucrative, are the new Stream release models missing the market?
Are there time-to-patch metrics for comparison with and without stream as compared with IDK Fedora git?
Rpms/kernel explains: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/kernel :
> The kernel is maintained in a source tree rather than directly in dist-git. The specfile is maintained as a template in the source tree along with a set of build scripts to generate configurations, (S)RPMs, and to populate the dist-git repository.
Here are fedora's kernel patches: https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/commits/ark-patc...
RHEL <= 9 has kernel-lt (Long Term) and kernel-ml (mainline) kernel patchsets and packages: https://pkgs.org/search/?q=kernel-lt https://www.google.com/search?q=kernel-lt+kernel-ml
Notable Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_deriv...
List of commercial products based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_products_ba...
There used to be a stack of numbered kernel patches in the kernel SRPM Source RPM, but now what is the best way to diff centos-stream-9's main branch with Torvalds/git:main? AFAIU kernel distributors must dist patches because GPLv2; packaging workflows are irrelevant to license terms? https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-st...
Fedora and many other distros do a lot of valued work, too.
FWICS there are FIPS kernel variants for Ubuntu <= 20.04 LTS (2020) but not 22.04 LTS (2022), and Debian and Ubuntu don't have the selinux policy set that Fedora and RHEL+EPEL have. https://ubuntu.com/kernel
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480033 :
> Would it be feasible to sed-replace the RHEL and/or Fedora selinux and container-selinux rulesets for use with other Linux distros?
> "AFAIU only SUSE can run both AppArmor and SELinux?
> And browsers are running as unconfined in selinux with like all major distros; even on ChromiumOS
Act like you added `systemd-nspawn respawn` to every SysV-init script and correctly formatted the epoch time in the correct column of each of the log files to merge and then logship again.
Conda-forge's GitHub PRs to feedstocks model works, but there are no grub or uboot or selinux-policy-targeted or container-selinux or kernel packages in conda-forge or Alpine linux.
containers/container-selinux: https://github.com/containers/container-selinux/tree/main https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/container-selinux/blob/ra...
From "Systemd service sandboxing and security hardening" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995566 :
> Which distro has the best out-of-the-box output for:?
systemd-analyze security
SystemCallFilter=@basic-io
SystemCallLog=~@basic-ioExperiments with plane-filling curves and Fourier transform
Wow this is a cool idea. I wonder if it would also be interesting to analyze the aperiodic tilings, including monotiles, that have popped up recently.
They are often constructed that way.
Aperiodic lattices in the plane arise from projection of the periodic grid in R^5 into an inclined plane (with irrational coefficients). Now in R^5 you have the famous Poisson summation formula, that says that the Fourier transform of a dirac comb on the grid is a dirac comb. By projecting this Poisson formula in the spatial and frequential domains, you obtain an aperiodic Poisson formula in dimension 2. Thus the Fourier transform of an aperiodic lattice is another aperiodic lattice.
Reciprocal lattice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_lattice :
> In physics, the reciprocal lattice represents the Fourier transform of another lattice. The direct lattice or real lattice is a periodic function in physical space, such as a crystal system (usually a Bravais lattice). The reciprocal lattice exists in the mathematical space of spatial frequencies, known as reciprocal space or k space, where `k` refers to the wavevector.
> [...] The reciprocal lattice plays a fundamental role in most analytic studies of periodic structures, particularly in the theory of diffraction. In neutron, helium and X-ray diffraction, due to the Laue conditions, the momentum difference between incoming and diffracted X-rays of a crystal is a reciprocal lattice vector. The diffraction pattern of a crystal can be used to determine the reciprocal vectors of the lattice. Using this process, one can infer the atomic arrangement of a crystal.
Was wondering about biomedical NIRS applications and crystallography molecular identification and just found this. Cool. How are aperiodic and reciprocal lattices different from any molecule (or subatomic particles in a field of superfluidic vortices in a fluid with viscosity<=1)?
Is this potentially part of how to make a medical tricorder (and win the Tricorder XPRIZE)?
Algae powers computer for a year using only light and water (2022)
currently hugged. https://web.archive.org/web/20220624095811/https://www.anthr...
From the (archived) article:
> In the new work published in Energy & Environmental Science, researchers at Cambridge University harnessed algae’s ability to produce electricity during photosynthesis. They put blue-green algae, also called cyanobacteria, into a see-through case made of plastic and aluminum. Then they placed it on a windowsill and connected it to the microprocessor, which they had programmed to run for cycles of 45 minutes followed by 15 minutes of rest.
"Powering a microprocessor by photosynthesis" (2022) https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/ee/d2ee0... :
> Abstract: Sustainable, affordable and decentralised sources of electrical energy are required to power the network of electronic devices known as the Internet of Things. Power consumption for a single Internet of Things device is modest, ranging from μW to mW, but the number of Internet of Things devices has already reached many billions and is expected to grow to one trillion by 2035, requiring a vast number of portable energy sources (e.g., a battery or an energy harvester). Batteries rely largely on expensive and unsustainable materials (e.g., rare earth elements) and their charge eventually runs out. Existing energy harvesters (e.g., solar, temperature, vibration) are longer lasting but may have adverse effects on the environment (e.g., hazardous materials are used in the production of photovoltaics). Here, we describe a bio-photovoltaic energy harvester system using photosynthetic microorganisms on an aluminium anode that can power an Arm Cortex M0+, a microprocessor widely used in Internet of Things applications. The proposed energy harvester has operated the Arm Cortex M0+ for over six months in a domestic environment under ambient light. It is comparable in size to an AA battery, and is built using common, durable, inexpensive and largely recyclable materials.
How many wh/kg/cm3?
List of Unix binaries that can be used to bypass local security restrictions
Most of them by very far rely on sudo. I've got a system without sudo. The only way to execute something as root on my system is to log in, using a U2F security key, from a second system (typically a small laptop sitting next to my workstation). That second system is connected to my workstation on a dedicated LAN only used by these two machines. Firewalls on both (for example my workstation only allow SSH in from that one LAN and only from the IP of my laptop on that LAN etc.). The laptop has no Internet access, WiFi disabled (modules prevented from loading, firewall preventing network access, etc.). The laptop's sole purpose is to run command as root on the workstation: it's its sole purpose.
The downside is that I allow "root SSH", contrarily to every single best practice out there. The upside... Well. Is that there's no "sudo" installed on my workstation.
I think no sudo even installed on the machine beats the "never allow root SSH" mantra but YMMV.
(to set up the system I install the system offline, from a Debian installation medium whose checksum and signature I've verified, do my thing as root on the workstation, set up the login using U2F from the laptop, then I "lock myself out" from login as root directly at the workstation by entering a password so long I'll never enter it, something like "neverenterthisrootpasswordanymoreusethelaptopu2fkeyinstead#$bey8rUtIopTY6"*. A bit of pain to enter twice but then I'm good to go)
Out of curiosity: What sensitive things does the root account protect on your workstation?
On my desktop (and probably 99% of people's desktops here) getting access to the user account is game over. The password manager? Runs as my user - one ptrace and the key can be extracted. Cookies for all my online services? Sitting right there in the home directory.
The only thing root access would give somebody on my machine is to uninstall some random packages or corrupt my install.
And don't get me wrong, I don't like this situation - I tried running some high-risk programs (browser, Libre Office) under flatpak to achieve at least some separation - but it breaks too many things.
> The only thing root access would give somebody on my machine is to uninstall some random packages or corrupt my install.
While I agree that compromise of an unprivileged account has significant costs, technically superusers do have significantly greater access to the system and so there are greater levels of risk.
RedoxOS is reimplementing Linux userspace utilities in rust in order to avoid C vulns in suid binaries; like ping, which requires raw sockets for ICMP (which most of us only need the Echo Request capability of)
Superuser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superuser
Capability-based security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
Privilege-based escalation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_escalation
Principle of least privilege: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
MAC: Mandatory Access Control: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control
>in suid binaries; like ping
ping hasn't required suid in ages, there's net.ipv4.ping_group_range and CAP_NET_RAW.
Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?
> My initial implementation worked at a whopping 200 permutations per second. That’s incredibly slow, and meant that it would take well over a century (in the worst case) for my program to finish. Now, it works at about 190,000 permutations per second, with an estimated worst-case search time of 2 months. (I haven’t encountered a scrambled cube position which has taken more than 10 hours.)
"The algorithmic trick that solves Rubik’s Cubes and breaks ciphers" (2022) https://youtu.be/wL3uWO-KLUE :
> Instead of 10^20 moves to find connecting path(s) towards Solved in a Rubik's cube, this algorithm solves in 2*10^10 from each side (and IIUC the solution side (1*10^10) can be cached?)
The manim code for the video and the c++ solution code are open source: https://github.com/polylog-cs/rubiks-cube-video/blob/main/co...
Interesting video. The approach in it is also inspired by meet-in-the-middle, but suffers from a significant deficiency: It requires a lot of memory—90 GiB—enough that the author had to borrow their university's compute cluster to conduct a solve, even when written and optimized in C++. Likewise, their "triple DES" presentation discussed another way that would require a database that's terabytes in size (specifically, memory that's O(N^0.5)). Nonetheless, I think it's a good exposition of meet-in-the-middle.
What's neat about the method in the post is that it requires O(N^0.5) time and O(N^0.25) memory, which allows running it on an entry-level consumer laptop (hours of time and a few GiB of memory) when implemented even in a dynamically typed, garbage-collected language.
> It requires a lot of memory—90 GiB—enough that the author had to borrow their university's compute cluster to conduct a solve
I remember something like fifteen years ago we needed a 128GB computer to solve IC modelling (timing closure) problems. While this was reasonably available, the only supplier we could find was gaming-oriented, so we had a blinky light tower PC in the corner of the server cupboard.
Anyway, never underestimate the power of a single computer, especially with a GPU.
MacBook Pro laptops can now be had with 96GB of RAM.
And terabyte class databases can be extremely fast if running on SSD.
It's also not hard these days to fire up an instance on AWS or other cloud service which will have up to a few terabytes of RAM.
Plus, you can always just bite the bullet and do it all out of swap - might not be as bad as you fear, and often can optimize whatever you're doing to be more online. There are countless tricks left over from the old days for doing out-of-core operations efficiently, whether disk or tape.
If you're firing up anything on AWS with that kind of RAM, you want to make sure you understand how much that's going to cost. The per second cost is always going to look really low and you will tend not to worry about it. However, once you do the math, you could find that you're easily and quickly spending more money than it would cost to buy a machine to run locally with that much RAM.
It's been fine when I've used terabyte instances for dynamic programming stuff similar to OP. You are babysitting it and waiting for a specific answer, not running a permanent service which will hemorrhage $$$ when you forget to turn it off. At dollars an hour, hard to forget...
So long as you actually play close attention to it, that's not a problem.
The issue is that many people fail to pay close attention, and that's where the money can really rack up.
[deleted]
I wonder if the algorithm can be run on a GPU, that should lower the time a lot.
Google to explore alternatives to robots.txt
There are a number of opportunities to solve for carbon.txt, security.txt, content licenses, indication of [AI] provenance, and do better than robots.txt; hopefully with JSON-LD Linked Data.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888037 : security.txt, carbon.txt, SPDX SBOM, OSV, JSON-LD, blockcerts
"Google will label fake images created with its A.I" (re: IPTC, Schema org JSON-LD" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896000
From "Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888037 :
> How many parsers should be necessary for https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/license metadata for resources with (Linked Data) URIs?
If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit three engineer-years to no-GIL CPython
The editorialized title "Meta pledges Three-Year sponsorship for Python if GIL removal is accepted" seems misleading at best. The actual wording was:
> support in the form of three engineer-years [...] between the acceptance of PEP 703 and the end of 2025
It seems much more like them pledging engineer time from Meta employees to work on this project than sponsorship, not a monetary sponsorship like the title implies.
Offering dedicated specific CPython resources (aka. enginneering hours) is worth more than a monetary sponsorship in my view.
How do I diff colesbury/nogil-3.12 with python/cpython? https://github.com/colesbury/nogil-3.12
32“ E Ink screen that displays daily newspapers on your wall (2021)
I'm a news junkie, and the power and allure of a newspaper's front page have always fascinated me. When I stumbled upon an article written by a Google engineer who had built an e ink device with the front page of his favorite daily newspaper prominently displayed on his wall, I was a bit jealous. So, I worked with a e-ink company called Visionect in Slovenia to build a version that comes shipped ready to put on your wall. The screen isn't cheap ($2500) because it's a huge 32" e-ink display. The beautiful glass screen is connected to wifi and we made it easy to choose your favorite newspaper frontpages to put on display. It's a bit like an ever changing artwork.
Why do larger e-ink screens cost more to produce?
Something like this for (e.g. Kanban card-based) project management would be cool, though the contrast at a distance.
The PineNote is a 9" eInk development device; 3287cm/3 for $400. https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote
But it's not going to look as nice as a 32" e-ink display on the wall.
Is there a yellow backlight, or a blueish backlight?
Is there a low-cost way to make a solar roof that varies in solar reflectivity? FWIU e-ink only requires voltage to cause the e-ink particles to flip over? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink
> Why do larger e-ink screens cost more to produce?
Last I knew the bulk of cost for e-ink displays was just due to the patent holders decision to charge a lot, which is disappointing, but can't go on that much longer...
This is a myth that people keep repeating. E-ink prices have very little to do with patents.
E-ink displays are more expensive because they are utterly niche compared to LCD screens (there are over 6 billion smartphone users in the world right now, and plenty of people own a smartphone, laptop, desktop, TV, tablet, smartwatch, then use a computer at work, interact with a self-checkout kiosk at the supermarket, etc).
There are basically two common use-cases for e-ink right now: e-readers (and nowadays 'e-notes', which have stylus input), and smart-pricetags in supermarkets. Neither of these require large e-ink screens, so there's no existing production line to feed these 32" monitors off. The 32" screens are created by hand-fusing 4 16" screens together, IIRC. This isn't automated because there's not enough demand to automate it.
The reason there's no demand for e-ink screens is that the technology just isn't very useful - I love e-ink, but it's not particularly flexible and can't be used in general-purpose devices that need to display video. It has its niches, but they're niche.
It's lower battery usage is due to low refresh rate, which is inherently incompatible with displaying video -if an e-reader refreshes once per minute and an LCD screen would have to refresh 60 times a second, then the LCD needs to refresh 3600x more often which means e-ink saves power even if the e-ink screen takes 10x or 100x the power per refresh. But if the e-ink screen plays video at 60FPS, then by definition it's refreshing 60 times a second and thus will use 10x or 100x the power of the equivalent LCD screen playing the same video.
If we want prices to drop substantially, we need more use-cases for e-ink. There's hope here, as the recent fast-ACEP tech (the Gallery 3) is color-tech that doesn't sacrifice half of your contrast and resolution (like Color Filter Arrays do), but is fast enough for an interactive device and is almost as fast to refresh as a monochrome screen (previous ACEP screens took min 7 seconds to refresh the screen, the new tech is amazing). With some refinement, it might be enough to bring e-notes somewhat into the mainstream.
So, all that said: e-ink screens that are 6" or less aren't really any more expensive than an LCD. It's only when you get outside of normal e-reader sizes that the price goes up like crazy.
...not to mention, e-ink isn't the only "e-paper" company - ReInkstone are making their DES screens, which dodge at least some of the patents on microencapsulated electrophoretic displays as their cofferdam tech doesn't use microcapsules at all and instead integrate the seals into the display.
Git and Jupyter Notebooks Guide
Curious that they discuss several options, but ignore the totally obvious one: just use jupytext [0]. Jupytext is a (tiny) jupyter extension that reads/writes notebooks as python files, with text cells being represented as comments. With jupytext, you do away with the stupid .ipynb format. As long as you don't need to save the cell outputs, which is the case for version control, jupytext is the way to go.
People: pip install jupytext. All your python files will become notebooks, and your notebooks will become python files.
What happens to the outputs in this case? I found the outputs to be both the most useful parts of notebooks, but also the most troublesome for diffing and versioning.
Why would you commit the outputs into git? That would be like committing compiled binary objects or pdfs. Of course the outputs are useful, but you just want to commit the sources.
The .ipynb stores inputs and outputs together in an unholy way. It is much cleaner to separate them. The inputs are python (or markdown) files that you can edit with a text editor and version control with git. The outputs are html, pdf, or whatever you want to nbconvert to and share.
The .ipynb file would only be useful if you want to share a stateful notebook, whose state cannot be easily reproduced by the people who you share it with. But that would be really bizarre and definitely in bad taste. Sharing the .ipynb is akin to sharing your .pyc files.
I love working with notebooks, but as a measure of hygiene I avoid .ipynb files altogether.
If you want to store (e.g. base64-encoded) outputs in Markdown, you're going to have to scroll past a lot of data to get to the next input cell in a notebook.
Jupyter notebooks store which Jupyter kernel they were run with to generate the outputs.
nbformat (.ipynb with inlined base64 outputs) isn't a sufficient package format: https://github.com/jupyter/enhancement-proposals/pull/103#is...
Papermill is one tool for running Jupyter notebooks as reports; with the date in the filename. https://papermill.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
A fun new feature we are working on in systemd: userspace-only reboot
I've thought about implementing this before (in a systemd alternative), but there are some good reasons to reboot. The kernel does leak, and only rebooting user space is a force multiplier for certain types of attacks where userspace is limited to an action a finite number of times per boot.
One recent article that comes to mind is this (though incrementing the counter here doesn't need a reboot to get hit): https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/01/exploiting-nu...
The other thing is that not rebooting the kernel removes the pressure on the kernel developers to reboot quickly. If people depend on it less, that can regress. systemd is big enough to affect that.
pivot_root doesn't replace the kernel or its state either. https://www.google.com/search?q=pivot_root
How much state is there in a kernel?
Ksplice > See also lists kexec, kGraft, kpatch, and KernelCare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice#See_also
Kgraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGraft
Live migration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_migration
libvirt: Guest migration > Offline migration: https://libvirt.org/migration.html#offline-migration
Memory forensics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_forensics : Volatility
awesome-forensics > acquisition: https://github.com/cugu/awesome-forensics#acquisition : Memory forensics acquisition tools: AVML, POFR: PenguinOS Flight Recorder, LIME
An Architectural Overview of QNX (1992) [pdf]
...no longer the only true microkernel in industry (the paper was written in 1992, back then QNX was certainly leading in this respect). Nowadays, open source as well as commercial L4-based microkernels are widely used, e.g. seL4 (UNSW), Fiasco (TU Dresden) and PikeOS (SYSGO).
Microkernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel
Category:Microkernel-based operating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Microkernel-based_ope...
- redox (rust-based) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_(operating_system)
- Nintendo Switch runs a microkernel OS
- Linux started in 1999 as a clone of MINIX and was initially developed on MINIX, which is a microkernel OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
Photonic chip transforms lightbeam into multiple beams with different properties
"Universal visible emitters in nanoscale integrated photonics" (2023) https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-10-7-8... :
> Visible wavelengths of light control the quantum matter of atoms and molecules and are foundational for quantum technologies, including computers, sensors, and clocks. The development of visible integrated photonics opens the possibility for scalable circuits with complex functionalities, advancing both science and technology frontiers. We experimentally demonstrate an inverse design approach based on the superposition of guided mode sources, allowing the generation and complete control of free-space radiation directly from within a single 150 nm layer Ta2O5 , showing low loss across visible and near-infrared spectra. We generate diverging circularly polarized beams at the challenging 461 nm wavelength that can be directly used for magneto-optical traps of strontium atoms, constituting a fundamental building block for a range of atomic-physics-based quantum technologies. Our generated topological vortex beams and the potential for spatially varying polarization emitters could open unexplored light–matter interaction pathways, enabling a broad new photonic–atomic paradigm. Our platform highlights the generalizability of nanoscale devices for visible-laser emission and will be critical for scaling quantum technologies.
Computer simulation provides 4k scenarios for a climate turnaround
From the linked article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36577474 :
> A large computer simulation dealing with this issue is now providing some answers. It combines climate models with economic models and 1,200 technologies for supplying and using energy, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As part of the study, a supercomputer calculated 4,000 scenarios for 15 regions of the world, taking into account possible developments in ten-year steps up to the year 2100.
> [...] "We considered 18 uncertainty factors, including population and economic growth, climate sensitivity, resource potential, the impact of changes in agriculture and forestry, the cost of energy technologies and the decoupling of energy demand from economic development," explains James Glynn of Columbia University.
"Deep decarbonisation pathways of the energy system in times of unprecedented uncertainty in the energy sector" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152... :
> Abstract: Unprecedented investments in clean energy technology are required for a net-zero carbon energy system before temperatures breach the Paris Agreement goals. By performing a Monte-Carlo Analysis with the detailed ETSAPTIAM Integrated Assessment Model and by generating 4000 scenarios of the world’s energy system, climate and economy, we find that the uncertainty surrounding technology costs, resource potentials, climate sensitivity and the level of decoupling between energy demands and economic growth influence the efficiency of climate policies and accentuate investment risks in clean energy technologies. Contrary to other studies relying on exploring the uncertainty space via model intercomparison, we find that the CO2 emissions and CO2 prices vary convexly and nonlinearly with the discount rate and climate sensitivity over time. Accounting for this uncertainty is important for designing climate policies and carbon prices to accelerate the transition. In 70% of the scenarios, a 1.5 ◦C temperature overshoot was within this decade, calling for immediate policy action. Delaying this action by ten years may result in 2 ◦C mitigation costs being similar to those required to reach the 1.5 ◦C target if started today, with an immediate peak in emissions, a larger uncertainty in the medium-term horizon and a higher effort for net-zero emissions.
> Highlights:
> • Probabilistic assessment of 4000 decarbonisation pathways with the ETSAP-TIAM.
> • Delaying the action for the 2 °C target costs similar to acting now for the 1.5 °C.
> • Demand electrification is higher in 2050 than today in all model runs.
> • Hydrogen is used in 99% of the model runs to meet the 1.5 °C target.
What about non-CO2 emissions and prices/fines/fees; like Methane (natural gas) which is like 80x worse than CO2 for climate?
Show HN: Python can make 3M+ WebSocket keys per second
The hardest part of debugging Python is "hitting the wall" when you come to a native library (compiled C code). And Python has achieved a lot of speed-ups from Py2 to Py3 by adding more compiled C code. This is a real blocker for understanding the foundation library.
On the other hand, in Java, with a few exceptions around Swing (native painting for GUIs) in Java, almost everything is written in pure Java, so you can debug all the way down if need be. It is a huge help for understanding the foundation library and all of its edge cases (normal for any huge library). Modern Java debuggers, like IntelliJ, are so crazy, they will decompile JARs and allow you to set debug breakpoints and step-into decompiled code. It is mind blowing when trying to debug a library that you don't own the source code (random quant lib, ancient auth lib, etc.).
> The hardest part of debugging Python is "hitting the wall" when you come to a native library (compiled C code). And Python has achieved a lot of speed-ups from Py2 to Py3 by adding more compiled C code.
"Debugging a Mixed Python and C Language Stack" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35710350
Quart is an async Python web microframework
how does one simply shove it in a container is my current headache. wsgi, asgi nginx gunicorn is a maze
ASGI > Implementations > Servers: https://asgi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/implementations.html#s... ; Daphne, Uvicorn, Hypercorn, Granian, NGINX Unit
asgiref: https://github.com/django/asgiref/blob/main/asgiref/sync.py AsyncToSync, SyncToAsync
Ask HN: What are the limits of Quantum-on-Silicon and Photonic computers?
Photonic interactions, electron spin, and electron charge all are used to implement quantum gates and operators.
What the comparative advantages of each approach?
Automated CPU Design with AI
From the abstract; "Pushing the Limits of Machine Design: Automated CPU Design with AI" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12456 :
> [...] This approach generates the circuit logic, which is represented by a graph structure called Binary Speculation Diagram (BSD), of the CPU design from only external input-output observations instead of formal program code. During the generation of BSD, Monte Carlo-based expansion and the distance of Boolean functions are used to guarantee accuracy and efficiency, respectively. By efficiently exploring a search space of unprecedented size 10^{10^{540}}, which is the largest one of all machine-designed objects to our best knowledge, and thus pushing the limits of machine design, our approach generates an industrial-scale RISC-V CPU within only 5 hours. The taped-out CPU successfully runs the Linux operating system and performs comparably against the human-designed Intel 80486SX CPU. In addition to learning the world's first CPU only from input-output observations, which may reform the semiconductor industry by significantly reducing the design cycle, our approach even autonomously discovers human knowledge of the von Neumann architecture.
The von Neumann (and Mark) architectures have an instruction pipeline bottleneck maybe by design for serial debuggability; as compared with IDK in-RAM computing with existing RAM geometries? (See also: "Rowhammer for qubits")
(Edit: High-Bandwidth Memory; hbm2e vs gddr6x (2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory )
Hopefully part of the fitness function is determined by the presence and severity of hardware side channels and electron tunneling; does it filter out candidate designs with side-channel vulnerabilities (that are presumed undetectable with TLA+)?
Ten-cent BPClip may soon let smartphones check blood pressure
From https://newatlas.com/medical/bpclip-smartphone-blood-pressur... :
> The BPClip simply gets clipped onto one corner of the user's smartphone, so that a tiny hole in the device sits over the phone's camera lens, and a light guide in it covers the phone's flash.
> Instructed by an accompanying app, the user then presses a fingertip down onto the hole – a spring in the clip provides resistance, allowing them to take multiple readings using different amounts of force.
> For each reading, the camera takes a photo of the flash-lit underside of the fingertip, looking through the hole. Because the hole is so small, each image just takes the form of a red dot. The diameter of that dot increases as more pressure is applied, while the brightness of the red color varies with the volume of blood being pumped in and out of the finger.
Some camera sensors detect infrared. An infrared LED (like in old remote controls) might be useful for this, too; like NIRS Near-Infrared Spectroscopy with chemometrics, which works because red and infrared light pass through tissue.
IDK what that would do for the cost of such a potential tricorder-like medical device attachment.
First 'tooth regrowth' medicine moves toward clinical trials in Japan
"Anti–USAG-1 therapy for tooth regeneration through enhanced BMP" (2021) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1798
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6855835701389665111...
From "Reactivating Dormant Cells in the Retina Brings New Hope for Vision Regeneration" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35871917: direct neuronal reprogramming (for retinal growth), Tissue NanoTransfection, Muller glia
"TNT" out of Ohio State: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection ; direct (epithelial,) stroma reprogramming
Regenerative medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_medicine
From https://www.ada.org/en/resources/research/health-policy-inst... :
> What share of U.S. children and adults have dental benefits?
> Dental benefits coverage varies by age. For children ages 2-18, 51.3 percent have private dental benefits, 38.5 percent have dental benefits through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and 10.3 percent do not have dental benefits. For adults ages 19-64, 59.0 percent have private dental benefits, 7.4 percent have dental benefits through Medicaid, and 33.6 percent do not have dental benefits. Source: Dental Benefits Coverage in the U.S.
TIL about Dental lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_laser
What percentage of dentists offices have lasers in the United States? https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+dentist+o...
FWIU, dental lasers cost from $4-40K per unit, per station in the office; and they may be tuned for specific applications or general purpose. There's a waveguide to guide the beam; and there are new waveguide methods for steering photon beams through opaque tissue (with e.g. dual beams).
"Scientists Have Discovered a Drug [Tideglusib] That Fixes Cavities and Regrows Teeth" (2017) that's already FDA approved for Alzheimer's but there are yet no clinical trials of it as a cavity fill?? https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-have-discovered-thi...
Tideglusib: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tideglusib
Can teeth be grown in molds from e.g. stem cells, or nanotransfected tissue with/without a 3-d printed scaffold or [...]?
Dental care probably has direct returns in labor productivity?
YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers
Students don't even have the option of paying for premium using their school account, and so if you assign them videos to watch (using that account) they must watch ads; is that correct?
I think YouTube should just drop the creators who demanded the greater subscription revenue that must've precipitated this change; go sell your own content.
FWIW, ad-free Khan Academy videos are subsidized by Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
Gping – ping, but with a graph
mtr does traceroute, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_(software) :
> The tool is often used for network troubleshooting. By showing a list of routers traversed, and the average round-trip time as well as packet loss to each router, it allows users to identify links between two given routers responsible for certain fractions of the overall latency or packet loss through the network.[4] This can help identify network overuse problems.[5]
Scapy has a 3d visualization of one traceroute sequence with vpython. In college, I remember modifying it to run multiple traceroutes and then overlaying all of the routes; and wondering whether a given route is even stable through a complete traceroute packet sequence. https://scapy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#tcp-tracer...
One way to avoid running tools that need root for crafting packets at layer 2 is to use setcap:
setcap CAP_NET_RAW /use/bin/python-scapy
My mind is blown by those 3D graphs. I almost want to make them dynamically drawn in a futuristic style and use that as screensaver...
Like a WebGL VPN company logo screensaver composed of all those routes we shouldn't trust?
graph-drawing gh topic lists a number of JS libraries: https://github.com/topics/graph-drawing
Is there a good way to make a JS screensaver that doesn't leak memory yet? Maybe WebGL could get that done
Maybe. I don't know. But that link sent me to another rabbit hole, thanks:)
VUDA: A Vulkan Implementation of CUDA
As someone who has never programmed directly for a GPU, how does this compare to HIP? Can this be an efficient abstraction over Nvidia and AMD GPUs?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34399633 :
>>> hipify-clang is a clang-based tool for translating CUDA sources into HIP sources. It translates CUDA source into an abstract syntax tree, which is traversed by transformation matchers. After applying all the matchers, the output HIP source is produced. [...]
(Edit) CUDA APIs supported by hipify-clang: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIPIFY/en/latest/supporte...
Show HN: Tabserve.dev. HTTPS proxy using Web Workers and a Cloudflare Worker
Tabserve gives you a https url for localhost using only the browser (tabserve.dev).
Take a look: https://tabserve.dev
This is pretty awesome. I was going to ask if it is constrained by any Same Origin restrictions, but I see the note at the bottom of the page that you must "enable CORS" on the localhost server, so indeed it is constrained by such policies. Specifically, I imagine the requirement is that the server you're tunneling to respond with `Access-Control-Allow-Origin: app.tabserve.dev`.
Is this correct? Or should the value be the subdomain of the cloudflare worker? In other words, which is the "origin" of the proxied requests? I assume it's `app.tabserve.dev` since the user is accessing the tunneled service through the worker subdomain which would be the value of the `Host` header.
You can probably just use access-control-allow-origin: * to "turn off" CORS on the local server.
Since you are behind the reverse proxy anyway, there is probably not much of a security implication?
> Since you are behind the reverse proxy anyway, there is probably not much of a security implication?
If you access other sites in the same browser, they'll be able to send requests to your private localhost server. I don't expect this to be a problem right now, but if it becomes a popular thing to do that might change.
GitHub's Copilot may lead to global $1.5T GDP boost
But if it and we don't write tests for our software - and think through writing tests when we write the code - the losses and liability may exceed such measures of return.
Current gen LLM (Large Language Model) AI are trained to regurgitate non-formally-verified code; and even if they were exclusively trained on labeled-as Formally Verified code, they would produce code that does not pass formal verification.
The LLM AI doesn't care about your liability or others'; we need to think through our code to write sufficient tests (given incomplete code specifications).
That $1.5T figure must be gross not net.
Atom feed format was born 20 years ago
Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors, in this case namely support from makers of popular software and content as well as social influence and documentation skills of creators.
The person who pushed RSS to success (IMO) Dave Winer was superb at communicating and evangelizing his goals, connecting partners like Netscape and NYT, and documenting his work including the RSS related tools he built.
His spec was “worse” in the sense that it was under specified but better in the sense that it achieved wide support (both in text and podcast form) among people who made content. This is partly because Dave had first an influential email newsletter and Wired column (DaveNet) and second an influential very early blog Scripting News. He had also been working with news companies for years at prior startups. He could write well. He showed up for and arranged meetings with people who did not at first understand the need for something like rss. He was clear and relentless in his promotion which was borne out of what seemed to be a genuine desire for open standards in this area rather than greed / trying to do lock in.
People with technical backgrounds in places like this tend to fixate on the technical aspects of Atom vs RSS. There is no question Atom is more technically correct. There is also no question (IMO) it came too late and focused on the wrong things — being correct and complete at the expense of being complicated and hard to understand — and more importantly was led and promoted by people who lacked the social skills to make it popular outside of technical circles. (These folks could be brutal about rss's flaws without seeming to have awareness of this shortcoming in their own effort.)
> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors
Or perhaps having at six year head start (RSS 0.90, 1999; Atom, 2005) and having it compound.
This includes podcasting, as the term was coined in 2004, but which was happening even before that (and before Atom was finalized):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology
First mover advantage, leading to network effects, can be a thing.
RSS > RSS compared with Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom
CDATA > CDATA in XML: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML
IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document, so CDATA tags (to prevent XSS) didn't work; and the issue remains with content syndication: feed elements should somehow HTML escape their content to prevent XSS (arbitrary JS on a different Origin)
XSS: Cross-site Scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
Same-origin policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o...
Content Security Policy (CSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP
CSRF: Cross-site request forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery
JSONP > CSRF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forge...
The whole internet was broken, and RSS helped us realize it: the one-way, one-time syndication advantage.
These days it's all about https://schema.org/CreativeWork JSON-LD instead of RDFa, which you can try to sanitize with Mozilla/bleach like arbitrary HTML in comments on the page.
> IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document…
AFAIK RDF Site Summary (the original meaning of "RSS") used XML from the start¹. You may be thinking of spiritual predecessors like the Apple-developed MCF².
¹ https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0 ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_tec...
Pretty sure I can remember the actionscript XML parser failing on RSS in like 2000 and the feed was to spec.
With that app, at least, I don't remember trying to just include RSS feed elements in HTML4 or XHTML; that app tried to parse the RSS and failed, it wasn't copying the feed elements without escaping href=javascript: links etc.
Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)
Distributed computing > Theoretical foundations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing#Theoreti...
Distributed algorithm > Standard problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_algorithm#Standard...
Notes from "Ask HN: Learning about distributed systems?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932271 ; CAP(?), BSP, Paxos, Raft, Byzantine fault, Consensus (computer science), Category: Distributed computing
"Ask HN: Do you use TLA+?" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30194993 :
> "Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport" ( https://g.co/kgs/nx1BaB )
Lamport timestamp > Lamport's logical clock in distributed systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp#Lamport's_lo... :
> In a distributed system, it is not possible in practice to synchronize time across entities (typically thought of as processes) within the system; hence, the entities can use the concept of a logical clock based on the events through which they communicate.
Vector clock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_clock
> https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-27442819 :
>> Can there still be side channel attacks in formally verified systems? Can e.g. TLA+ help with that at all?
One initial time synchronization may be enough, given availability of new quantum time-keeping methods (with e.g. a USB interface).
"Quantum watch and its intrinsic proof of accuracy" (2022) https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev... https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-discovered-an-e...
Anatomy of an ACH transaction
ACH transactions happen every day
Yes and they happen very s-l-o-w-ly.
Sometimes they can take up to 3 business days (not counting weekends and holidays). And they only work during "bankers hours" --- between 10am and 3pm each day.
In other words, ACH is the horse and buggy way to process financial transactions with lots of manual work required along the way.
It shouldn't be this way and most everyone knows it. The new and improved and long overdue way is called FedNow and will operate 24/7/365 and will offer almost immediate results --- so you can do amazing, wonderful, high tech things like electronically pay a friend your part of the dinner check while still sitting at the table.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
I've always heard ACH is slow, and the article mentions that Venmo uses it. So why then can I deposit my Venmo balance into my linked bank account almost instantly for a very small fee?
Instant deposits usually don't use ACH, but rather debit network rails. These are instant (at least the payment confirmation is, if not the settlement – but that's usually good enough for the use case.
If you can really perform one using your account and routing number, it might also be RTP.
;"Why we can't have nice things, why we can't just email money on the internet"
From "FedNow FAQ" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515531 :
> W3C ILP Interledger Protocol [1] specifies addresses [2]: [...]
>> Neighborhoods are leading segments with no specific meaning, whose purpose is to help route to the right area. At this time, there is no official list of neighborhoods, but the following list of examples should illustrate what might constitute a neighborhood:
>> - crypto. for ledgers related to decentralized crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or XRP.
>> - sepa. for ledgers in the Single Euro Payments Area.
>> - dev. for Interledger Protocol development and early adopters
> From "ILP Addresses - v2.0.0" [2]:
>> Example Global Allocation Scheme Addresses
>> - g.acme.bob - a destination address to the account "bob" held with the connector "acme"
>> - g.us-fed.ach.0.acmebank.swx0a0.acmecorp.sales.199.~ipr.cdfa5e16-e759-4ba3-88f6-8b9dc83c1868.2 - destination address for a particular invoice, which can break down as follows:
>> -- Neighborhoods: us-fed., ach., 0.
>> -- Account identifiers: acmebank., swx0a0., acmecorp., sales, 199 (An ACME Corp sales account at ACME Bank)
>> -- Interactions: ~ipr, cdfa5e16-e759-4ba3-88f6-8b9dc83c1868, 2*
> And from [3] "Payment Pointers and Payment Setup Protocols":
>> The following payment pointers resolve to the specified endpoint URLS:
$example.com -> https://example.com/.well-known/pay
$example.com/invoices/12345 -> https://example.com/invoices/12345
$bob.example.com -> https://bob.example.com/.well-known/pay
$example.com/bob -> https://example.com/bob
<meta
name="monetization"
content="$<a href="http://wallet.example.com/alice" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">wallet.example.com/alice">
> And then you realize you're sharing payment address information over a different but comparably-unsecured channel in a non-stanfardized way; From https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0009-simple-... :
>> Relation to Other Protocols: SPSP is used for exchanging connection information before an ILP payment or data transfer is initiated
> To do a complete business process, [there's] signaling around transactions, which then necessarily depend upon another - hopefully also cryptographically-secured and HA Highly Available - information system with API version(s) and database schema(s) unless there's something like Interledger SPSP Simple Payment Setup Protocol and Payment Pointers [...]
Clearing (finance) > US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_(finance)#United_Stat...
ACH Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network :
> The Federal Reserve's FedACH and The Clearing House Payments Company's Electronic Payments Network (EPN) are the two ACH operators in the United States.[3]
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232243 :
> FWIU, each trusted ACH (US 'Direct Deposit') party has a (one) GPG key that they use to sign transaction documents sent over now (S)FTP on scout's honor - on behalf of all of their customers' accounts.
Payment rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_rail
EFT: Electronic Funds Transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_funds_transfer
From "Ask HN: What security is in place for bank-to-bank EFT?" (2021) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111184 :
> AFAIU, no existing banking transaction systems require the receiver to confirm in order to receive a funds transfer. [...]
> ILP: Interledger Protocol > RFC 32 > "Peering, Clearing and Settling" describes how ~EFT with Interledger works: https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen...
Who/what are you replying to?
Is ORM still an anti-pattern?
I've been doing ORM on Java since Hibernate was new, and it has always sucked. One of the selling points, which is now understood to be garbage, is that you can use different databases. But no-one uses different databases. Another selling point which is "you don't need to know SQL", is also garbage. Every non-trivial long-lived application will require tweaks to individual queries at the string level. The proper way to build a data layer is one query at a time, as a string, with string interpolation. The closer you are to raw JDBC the better.
Oh yeah, another bad reason for ORM: to support the "Domain Model". Which is always, and I mean always, devoid of any logic. The so-called "anemic domain model" anti-pattern. How many man-hours have been wasted on ORM, XML, annotations, debugging generated SQL, and so on? It makes me cry.
> The proper way to build a data layer is one query at a time, as a string, with string interpolation.
Surely you mean a parameterized query string and not string interpolation, which is susceptible to sql injection.
Details. But sure. In truth the best way to do the data layer is to use stored procs with a generated binding at the application layer. This is absolutely safe from injection, and is wicked fast as well.
Having been on the team that inherited a project full on stored procedures (more than once): no thank you, not ever again.
Opaque, difficult to debug, high risk to invoke, difficult to version and version-control properly. I’m sure they could be done “less worse”, but I doubt they can be done well.
Stored procedure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_procedure
Are there SQL migration tools like Alembic and South that also version and sync Stored Procedures? (Alembic on "Replaceable objects" and schema: https://alembic.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/cookbook.html#repla... , alembic_utils: https://github.com/olirice/alembic_utils )
From "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15949610 :
> ORMs:
> - Are maintainable by a team. "Oh, because that seemed faster at the time."
> - Are unit tested: eventually we end up creating at least structs or objects anyway, and then that needs to be the same everywhere, and then the abstraction is wrong because "everything should just be functional like SQL" until we need to decide what you called "the_initializer2".
> - Can make it very easy to create maintainable test fixtures which raise exceptions when the schema has changed but the test data hasn't.
ORMs may help catch incomplete migrations; for example when every reference to a renamed column hasn't been updated, or worse when foreign key relations changed breakingly.
django_rest_assured generates many tests for the models (SQL)/views/API views in a very DRY way from ORM schema and view/controller/route registrations, but is not as fast as e.g. FastAPI w/ SQLalchemy or django-ninja.
Tinc, a GPLv2 mesh routing VPN
Tinc is incredible, it has worked flawlessly for me for 6+ years with exactly 0 maintenance.
As trustworthy as it is, I am sadly on the hunt to replace it. Compared to wireguard, the throughput ain't great, and it takes way too much CPU on my low power nodes. I would pay good money for "tinc, but with wireguard transport" -- there's of course projects purporting to do this but I haven't found one I trust yet.
Would Tailscale be an effective replacement for Tinc? It's built on top of Wireguard and works really well.
WebVM runs x86 binaries in WASM on any browser w/ ("[CheerpX:] an x86-to-WebAssembly JIT compiler, a virtual block-based file system, and a Linux syscall emulator") and for external sockets there's Tailscale networking. https://webvm.io/
IIUC that means an SSH (and/or MoSH Mobile Shell) client in a WASM WebVM in a browser tab could connect to a (tailscale (wg)) VPN mesh? (And JupyterLite+WebVM could ssh over an in-browser VPN mesh)
You'd probably need to compile a userspace wireguard implementation with a fork of the WebVM Dockerfile, or is that redundant because tailscale already wg's the sockets?: https://github.com/leaningtech/webvm/blob/main/dockerfiles/d...
I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)
I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?
I mean, they’re within their right to pull support, but people are equally within their right to point out how that is shooting themselves and the RHEL communities in the foot.
This. What a good opportunity to compare: the (GitOps!) packaging workflows, build server security, software supply chain integrity controls, issue tracking / triage, wiki, documentation, kernel patching, cloud fuzzing / integration testing, and baseline MAC and DAC policies of the stable kernel patchset OSes within budget for schools, hobbyists, after workers, and corporations who can and for some services maybe should afford an SLA.
On worthwhile investments of time differentiating our offering in InfoSec and Operating Systems,
FWIU (RH) OpenShift (and MicroShift) does k8s containers most correctly in terms of separate SELinux contexts per container, which we should probably have for browser tabs, too. Do (a) browsers, (b) Cloudflare Runners, and (c) Docker WASM runtimes run WASM tasks without container-like process isolation; all as the same user and cgroup and context?
> which we should probably have for browser tabs, too
This would be incredible
Would it be feasible to sed-replace the RHEL and/or Fedora selinux and container-selinux rulesets for use with other Linux distros?
AFAIU only SUSE can run both AppArmor and SELinux?
And browsers are running as unconfined in selinux with like all major distros; even on ChromiumOS (which was based on Gentoo, Gnome, and Chrome) where WASM or a paid shell (or 15-30% cut from the Play Store only) is the only way for the kids to Python on the Chromebooks we bought them for school.
Wouldn't it be great for them to not have to switch OSes and distros throughout the day.
I don't know about "sed-replace", but you can download the RHEL selinux-policy source package from https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/selinux-policy
Playing sounds of healthy coral on reefs makes fish return (2019)
Coral reef restoration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_reef_restoration
"Coral restoration – A systematic review of current methods, successes, failures and future directions" (2020) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... ; citations of https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=5,47&sciodt=...
Sunscreen > Environmental effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen#Environmental_effect... :
> Additionally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has indicated that coral decline is associated with effects from climate change (warming oceans, rising water levels, acidification), overfishing, and pollution from agriculture, wastewater, and urban run-off.[155]
Oxybenzone > Environmental effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxybenzone#Environmental_effec... :
> [Oxybenzone-containing sunscreen is now banned] in many areas [45] such as Palau, [46] Hawaii, [5] nature reserves in Mexico, Bonaire, the Marshall Islands, the United States Virgin Islands, Thailand's marine natural parks, [47] the Northern Mariana Islands, [48] and Aruba. [49]
Thanks coral restoration volunteers!
Are there already coral restoration drones / RUVs?
Is there a SAR Synthetic Aperture Radar -like imaging capability for mapping coral health; with sensor fusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic-aperture_radar
Sensor fusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion
"Bacterial sensors send a jolt of electricity when triggered" https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/bacterial-sensors-send-jolt-...
re: sensor nets: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1612605800576335874 ... ansible-OpenWRT, [DuckLink] LoRa, MEMS wave power
LoRa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
#Goal14: Life below water: https://www.globalgoals.org/goals/14-life-below-water/
#SDG14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development : https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal14
Do coral fragments have to be planted ashore or could they be ~transplanted by a drone?
EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be freely available [pdf]
IIUC this means that EU government standards must be public domain? Or, preexisting paywalled / committee_attendance_required standards are now conveniently by decree public domain?
What are some good examples of Open Standards and Open Web Standards for EU and other world regions?
We all benefit from Open Standards; but in a competitive market specifying any particular standard - open or not - may be disadvantageous for the market.
Open Standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
Open Standards > Specific definitions of an open standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#Specific_definit...
Web Standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards
E.g. W3C, IETF, WHATWG, and ECMA develop open standards.
W3C Web Monetization: https://webmonetization.org/ :
> The Web Monetization API allows websites to automatically and passively receive payments from Web Monetization-enabled visitors.
From https://interledger.org/faq/ :
> Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard. Using the Interledger Protocol, the Web Monetization proposed standard aims to make it easier for web creators to generate income from their work without relying on advertising, site-by-site subscriptions or tracking models.
IIUC, ILP messages would help financial regulators - such as FTC CAT Consolidated Audit Trail - audit traditional ledgers and cryptoassets?
Interledger was contributed to W3C and has undergone significant major revision; including packetization of liquidity into many small transactions. FWIU, W3C Interledger Protocol is a W3C spec but by producing IETF-style numbered RFCs, their process slightly differs from the W3C WG Working Group model (with a page, a mailing list; and one or more git Repositories with Issues: github.com/orgname, github.com/orgname/readme, github.com/orgname/orgname.github.io, ).
I wouldn't call the "web standards" actual standards in any meaningful sense; real standards change slowly, while web "standards" churn routinely according to the whims of Big Tech.
All standards development groups have to deal with people that don't help; that just complain and diminish the work of others.
When "the work of others" is to further a monopoly, it should not be considered acceptable.
Are you arguing that there's gatekeeping at the standards organizations where all parties disclose their interests (Use Cases)?
Independent, state, academia, and industry are all invited to contribute time to open [web] standards that solve for many users and use cases.
W3C Process Document > 2. Members and the Team: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/#Organization
"The IETF process: an informal guide" > 2.6. Bodies involved in the process: https://www.ietf.org/standards/process/informal/
Ecma By-laws > Art. 3: Membership: https://www.ecma-international.org/policies/by-laws/
Ecma TC39 (ECMAscript (JS)) Process matrix: https://tc39.es/process-document/
Free redistribution without modification, is likely a better model
Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located
A quick and dirty way to do this is run the program through `strace` and find out what syscall it issues to read it.
I had to do this to figure out where Cold Steel was reading save files from years back: https://vaughanhilts.me/blog/2018/02/16/playing-trails-of-co...
ps wxa | grep <cmd> # or pgrep
strace -f -f -e trace=file <cmd> | grep -v '-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)$'
Strace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strace
I use quick and dirty greps all the time, even when there is a "better" option available. It just works and is very intuitive in interactive contexts. Probably GP works in a similar way.
Remembered to add the `2>&1` stderr>stdout output redirection:
ps wxa | grep <cmd> # or pgrep
strace -f -f -e trace=file <cmd> 2>&1 | grep -v '-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)$'
In lieu of strace, IDK how fast `ls -al /proc/${pid}/fd/*` can be polled and logged in search of which config file it is; almost like `lsof -n`:
pid=$$ # this $SHELL's pid
help set; # help help
(set -B; cat /proc/"${pid}"/{cmdline,environ}) \
| tr '\0' $'\n'
(while 1; do echo \#$pid; ls -al /proc/${pid}/fd/*; done) | tee "file_handle_to_file_path.${pid}.log"
# Ctrl-C
## < managed by config_mgmt_system_xyz (in path.to.module.callable) >
## </ managed>I prefer to use process substitution (not in POSIX):
strace -f -e trace=file -o >(grep -v ENOENT) <cmd>Ask HN: Did studying proof based math topics make you a better programmer?
Hello, Hope all is well. I love math but haven’t studied much of it.
I have only studied up to real analysis. But definitely not a whole semester worth; my experience with analysis has been analogous to Poor performance in a quarter based analysis course. I did some exercises but not many.
I have heard from an mit professor[1] that math is the way to learn to think rigorously. So I’m curious about this and I’d like to improve my thinking skills in the hope that I will become a better programmer.
In an article a math professor said that there was some evidence that math improved logical skills[2].
So I’m wondering if any of you noticed that your thinking skills improved thereby making you a better programmer after studying analysis or topology or some other proof based math course.
Also which math other than the math required in CS programs should one study to be a better programmer and thinker? Thanks [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SZF0MFm9pqw&pp=ygUTQWR2aWNlIHJ1c3MgdGVkcmFrZQ%3D%3D [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opinion/sunday/math-logic-smarter.html
Yes, in the sense that "math is programming paper instead of computers", being better at one translates to being better at the other. This intuition can even be made precise via the "Curry-Howard isomorphism", upon which "proof assistants" such as Coq are built.
Lean mathlib was originally a type checker proof assistant, but now leanprover-community is implementing like all math as proofs in Lean in the mathlib project.
Lean (proof assistant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(proof_assistant)
"Lean mathlib overview": https://leanprover-community.github.io/mathlib-overview.html
"Where to start learning Lean": https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib/wiki/Where-t...
leanprover-community/mathlib: https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib
Decades-long bet on consciousness ends
I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself. So as to be able to develop a rich model of itself and its relationship with its environment, and that thing will resemble a whole lot what we call consciousness ~conscience~. Then, of course, we will push the goalposts on what conscience is, so as to protect our fragile human egos.
EDIT: fixed spelling of consciousness. Apologies from an english second language speaker.
Automata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory#Hierarchy_in_t...
Sentience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience#Digital_sentience
Artificial consciousness > Testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness
Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory :
> In constructor theory, a transformation or change is described as a task. A constructor is a physical entity that is able to carry out a given task repeatedly. A task is only possible if a constructor capable of carrying it out exists, otherwise it is impossible. To work with constructor theory, everything is expressed in terms of tasks. The properties of information are then expressed as relationships between possible and impossible tasks. Counterfactuals are thus fundamental statements, and the properties of information may be described by physical laws.[4] If a system has a set of attributes, then the set of permutations of these attributes is seen as a set of tasks. A computation medium is a system whose attributes permute to always produce a possible task. The set of permutations, and hence of tasks, is a computation set . If it is possible to copy the attributes in the computation set, the computation medium is also an information medium.
Is computation medium sufficient to none, some, or all of the sentient computational tasks done by humans?
Notice of Intent to Amend the Prescription Drug List: Vitamin D (2020)
Reminder that taking Vitamin D in excess without having enough Vitamin K could lead to vascular calcification, whereas sufficient levels of Vitamin K promotes proper absorption of calcium into bones.
Vitamin K supplementation for the primary prevention of osteoporotic fractures: is it cost-effective and is future research warranted? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22398856/
Matrix Gla protein is an independent predictor of both intimal and medial vascular calcification in chronic kidney disease https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63013-8
Matrix Gla protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_Gla_protein
What's considered excess for Vitamin D?
UK NHS page says:
"If you choose to take vitamin D supplements, 10 micrograms a day will be enough for most people."
"Do not take more than 100 micrograms (4,000 IU) of vitamin D a day as it could be harmful. This applies to adults, including pregnant and breastfeeding women and the elderly, and children aged 11 to 17 years."
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-...
The problem with vitamin D is that there's a lot of wrong information. It's because of this[0]:
>A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for vitamin D was recently discovered; in a correct analysis of the data used by the Institute of Medicine, it was found that 8895 IU/d was needed for 97.5% of individuals to achieve values ≥50 nmol/L. Another study confirmed that 6201 IU/d was needed to achieve 75 nmol/L and 9122 IU/d was needed to reach 100 nmol/L.
>The largest meta-analysis ever conducted of studies published between 1966 and 2013 showed that 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels <75 nmol/L may be too low for safety and associated with higher all-cause mortality
10 mcg = 400 IU. It's based on the previous (erroneous) daily recommended intake of 20 mcg per day.
Also, if you look at how much vitamin D you get from sunlight then [1]:
>A minimum erythema dose (1 MED) amounts to about 30 minutes midsummer midday sun exposure in Oslo (=20 mJ/cm2). Such an exposure given to the whole skin surface is equivalent to taking between 10,000 and 20,000 IU vitamin D orally, i.e. as much as 250-500 μg vitamin D, a similar amount as that obtained when consuming 200-375 mL of cod liver oil
It makes me wonder if health authorities use a dart board to set recommended amounts for vitamins. But hey, at least they're finally changing things and 4000 IU (100 mcg) seems reasonable.
I'm just wondering how they justified keeping recommendations at 10-20 mcg a day when the sunlight study says you can get 250-500 mcg in 30 minutes.
Edit: I believe it's 30 minutes of midday sun. You're going to get a lot less vitamin D at other times of the day.
> is equivalent to
How does 30m exposure compare to a full workday in the sun? Does it scale up to a limit? What are the serum correlates to these dimensional studies?
def gridsearch(person, intake={vitamin_d, vitamin_k, calcium, fiber})I don't know. But it is my understanding that how high up in the sky the sun is matters a lot. Ie 5 pm sun is going to be a lot less effective than midday sun, because UV-B light has to go through more of the atmosphere.
>Does it scale up to a limit?
Yes, because sunlight only really makes a precursor to vitamin D. Ie you can't overdose on vitamin D from sunlight.
Prompt: generate a dataframe that lists: the amount of sunlight exposure by time, given the UV index, that corresponds to a given dose of Vitamin D in IUs, and milligrams (for each and/or an average patient profile)
How much vitamin D supplementation results in the same serum level as sunlight exposure?
Gas Is Here to Stay for Decades, Say Fossil Fuel Heavyweights
Natural gas is CH4 (methane).
Methane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
/? methane emissions rules: https://www.google.com/search?q=methane+emissions+rules
From https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration... :
> Oil and natural gas operations are the nation’s largest industrial source of methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, on average, over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere and is responsible for approximately one third of the warming from greenhouse gases occurring today. Sharp cuts in methane emissions are among the most critical actions the U.S. can take in the short term to slow the rate of climate change. Oil and natural gas operations are also significant sources of other health-harming air pollutants, including smog-forming volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and toxic air pollutants such as benzene.
Diaphora: an open-source program diffing IDA plugin
What would it take to add an adapter to or port Diaphora to Ghidra?
A bunch of open source Ghidra plugins, some ported from IDA: https://github.com/fr0gger/awesome-ida-x64-olly-plugin/blob/... ctrl-f 'diff', 'bindiff'
ghidra-patchdiff-correlator#how-does-it-work: https://github.com/threatrack/ghidra-patchdiff-correlator#ho...
https://ghidra.re/ghidra_docs/api/ghidra/python/PythonPlugin...
ghidra-jython-kernel + jupyter_console: https://github.com/AllsafeCyberSecurity/ghidra-jython-kernel
ghidrathon https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/ghidrathon-snaking-g... :
> Ghidrathon replaces the existing Python 2 extension implemented via Jython. This includes the interactive interpreter window, integration with the Ghidra Script Manager, and script execution in Ghidra headless mode. You can build and install Ghidrathon using the steps outlined in our README to start using the features described below [...]
> Alternatives: Ghidrathon is one of multiple solutions, including Ghidraal, Ghidra Bridge, and pyhidra, that enables Python 3 scripting in Ghidra. Each solution is implemented differently with accompanying benefits and limitations. We encourage you to explore all solutions and choose which best fits your needs.
Removing official support for Red Hat enterprise Linux
> For all of my open source projects, effective immediately, I am no longer going to maintain 'official' support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
> I will still support users of CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, and Alma Linux, as I am able to test against those targets.
Open Source projects cannot afford to support (post-IBM-acquisition) RedHat RHEL license terms. How does that change developers' (coders, actual merge maintainers) and maybe also influencers' valuation of an acquired Linux distribution (with a new Stream model)?
Unexpected downsides of UUID keys in PostgreSQL
Can UUID v7 still be created independently, on a client for instance? Or do they ideally need to be generated in the same place?
Yes, UUID v7 can be generated independently. The UUID has three parts, which maintains strict chronological ordering for UUIDs generated in one process, and to within clock skew when UUIDs are generated on different systems.
The three parts are:
- time-based leading bits.
- sequential counter, so that multiple UUID 7s generated very rapidly within the same process will be monotonic even if the time counter does not increment.
- enough random bits to ensure no collisions and UUIDs cannot be guessed.
> There are new UUID formats that are timestamp-sortable; for when blockchain cryptographic hashes aren't enough entropy.
Note that multiple rounds of cryptographic hashing is not considered sufficient anymore; PBKDF2 and Argon2 are Key Derivation Functions, and those are used instead of hash functions.
"New UUID Formats – IETF Draft" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088213
draft-peabody-dispatch-new-uuid-format-04 Internet-Draft "New UUID Formats" https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-peabody-dispatch... ; UUID6, UUID7, UUID8
Hackers can steal cryptographic keys by video-recording power LEDs 60 feet away
Air-gap malware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-gap_malware
Some Blue LEDs contain sapphire, which is apparently macrostate entangleable.
> Some Blue LEDs contain sapphire, which is apparently macrostate entangleable.
I’ve studied quantum cryptography rather extensively, and I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
You could have a power LED that contains an actual magical quantum computer running attacker controlled software and with unlimited entanglement with the attacker, and it would not have a qualitatively greater ability to exfiltrate information to the attacker than a plain old LED would have. At best you would get a bandwidth increase by a small constant factor, improved tolerance to noise, and the ability to prevent anyone else from decoding the transmission.
Is there a published way to cause nonlocal entanglement between (blue, sapphire) LEDs; with just high/low voltage regulation, and/or with better or different control of the electron lepton particle properties other than just voltage on or off (i.e. spin,)?
What is the maximum presumed distance over which photon emissions from blue LEDs can be entangled? What about with [time-synchronized] applied magnetic fields? Could newer waveguide approaches - for example, dual beams - improve the distance and efficiency of transceivers operating with such a quantum communication channel?
From "Experiment demonstrates continuously operating optical fiber made of thin air" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35812168 :
> Electrons turn piece of wire into laser-like light source" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33490730
"Trillionths of a second: Photon pairs compress an electron beam into short pulses" (2023-06-19) https://phys.org/news/2023-06-trillionths-photon-pairs-compr...
> What is also remarkable: Plane electromagnetic waves like a light beam normally cannot cause permanent velocity changes of electrons in vacuum, because the total energy and the total momentum of the massive electron and a zero rest mass light particle (photon) cannot be conserved. However, having two photons simultaneously in a wave traveling slower than the speed of light solves this problem (Kapitza-Dirac effect).
> For Peter Baum, physics professor and head of the Light and Matter Group at the University of Konstanz, these results are still clearly basic research, but he emphasizes the great potential for future research: "If a material is hit by two of our short pulses at a variable time interval, the first pulse can trigger a change and the second pulse can be used for observation—similar to the flash of a camera."
Chirped Pulse Amplification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification
What Hz rate is necessary to do CPA Chirped Pulse Amplification with laser, or with a [blue] LED? FWIU lasers have a repetition rate between 0.1Hz and 1Mhz, and a pulse width between 1 picosecond and 1 millisecond?
Looks like there are already commercial LED CPA systems.
Aren't there also weird signal effects with e.g. PWM and a blue led connected to a Pi with a sufficient clock rate? What are the maximum binary data transmission distances for [blue] LEDs?
How to fade an LED in and out when you can only vary 5volts on and off? PWM: Pulse Width Modulation; you vary the duty cycle:
PWM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation
"Learn PWM signal using Wokwi Logic Analyzer" https://blog.wokwi.com/explore-pwm-with-logic-analyzer/
Wokwi > New (Pi Pico w/ Micropython) LED project: https://wokwi.com/projects/300504213470839309
Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp
What language is HN written in ?
Arc I believe.
OMG, Paul Graham actually released Arc in some form? I thought he never finished it.
I was going to make snarky comment about how between spez and PG, Lisp must actually be extended-release brain poison for people in executive management positions; now I wonder if spez just knows PG personally and takes his advice.
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Measuring blood pressure for less than a dollar using a phone
I miss the SpO2 sensor on my old S5. It used to work up until a couple years ago when S Health took out the functionality.
Oh Gawd.
My wife did not feel well last year and thought her pulse was going up. I figure I'd reassure her quickly (or notice an issue) with my Note 8.
Unbeknowst to me, some samsung update put the hardware functionality behind some health app that wanted to setup a tracking profile and two factor authentication and my email and my phone and name and details and preferences and goals and 12 point health plan and whatnot.
By the end I was the one with anxiety attack. I'm still livid when I think about it. I'm not a violent or profane man but... I have some thoughts reserved for people who planned, approved and implemented that. Not all evil is big evil. Little evil is evil too (Note for all fellow software engineers here :)
An open source app off Fdroid like HeartBeat may or may not have a similar error rate: https://github.com/berdosi/HeartBeat
I think I picked up a dedicated unit finger pulse oximeter for like $20.
FWIU Apple Watch is one product with FDA approval as a medical device (ECG Electrocardiogram) for detection of AFib Atrial Fibrillation and Parkinsons.
Medical device design > Pathway to clearance or approval: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_device_design#Pathway_...
My Apple Watch detected an AFib about a year and a half ago. Was mildly freaked out at the time but glad that I got the alert. Nothing major, thankfully. Was on a mostly plant-based diet (no meat at all) and wasn't getting enough iron. Easy fix.
>...Was on a mostly plant-based diet (no meat at all)...
i.e., A vegetarian diet?
Sounds like it was vegetarian, bordering on vegan.
This is correct. Or to paraphrase The Princess Bride, “Only mostly Vegan”.
The hemoglobin (blood Iron level) finger prick test is used to screen blood donations; they give you a free Iron test when you donate blood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism#Nutrients_and_potenti... :
> Vegan diets tend to be high in dietary fiber, folate, vitamins C and E, potassium, magnesium, and unsaturated fats.[34] However, consuming no animal products increases the risk of deficiencies of vitamins B12 and D, calcium, iron, and omega-3 fatty acids. [34][264]
> The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that special attention may be necessary to ensure that a vegan diet will provide adequate amounts of vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, calcium, iodine, iron, and zinc. It also states that concern that vegans and vegan athletes may not consume an adequate amount and quality of protein is unsubstantiated. [265]
FWIU, high-red-meat diet outcomes are probably on average worse.
"The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance" (2021) https://www.amazon.com/Plant-Based-Athlete-Game-Changing-App...
There are also low cost Smartphone fundoscopy devices for eye / retinal health chart images: https://www.aao.org/eyenet/article/smartphone-funduscopy
You can't use AI to classify and predict e.g. diabetic retinopathy from retinal images unless you have retinal images in the chart, over time.
Mars Declared Unsafe For Humans: No one can survive for longer than four years
Tardigrade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
"Scientists Put Tardigrade DNA Into Human Stem Cells. They May Create Super Soldiers." (2023) https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a43509580/t...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35447885
Tardigrade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade#Physiology :
> Tardigrades are thought to be able to survive even complete global mass extinction events caused by astrophysical events, such as gamma-ray bursts, or large meteorite impacts.[9][10] Some of them can withstand extremely cold temperatures down to 0.01 K (−460 °F; −273 °C) (close to absolute zero), while others can withstand extremely hot temperatures up to 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C)[36][37] for several minutes, pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space.[38] Tardigrades that live in harsh conditions undergo an annual process of cyclomorphosis, allowing for survival in subzero temperatures. [39]
What selected for tardigrades' radiation shielding features?
Perhaps humanoid robots (that children can push over) could better withstand high-radiation environments.
What are some of the other advanced solar and cosmic radiation shielding approaches? IIRC spinning Superconducting materials have better shielding, but may not be as shielded as drilling into an asteroid already on a trajectory similar to the desired transit.
Barring that, I think it's going to need to be matter teleportation (which we don't want to imagine un-friendly aliens having either).
A Case of the MUMPS (2007)
HL7 starts to make more sense to me now.
The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah
That's why you see this at the computer history museum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot
sort of like the great-great-grandparent of 3dbenchy:
Computer graphics > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics#History
History of computer animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation
Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny
Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness:
Yeah, I don't really get what happened there. They found out 20 years later than it was a cropped image from Playboy, and eventually both Playboy and the model were fine with it being used for research purposes. Then another 20 years later people re-discovered this and now it was sexist?
Regardless, I read some other literature and I do agree that it was probably well past time to update a reference image that wasnt a 1970's 512x512 image. But the non-technical reasoning around it is baffling. Well, not baffling for American culture, but disappointing indeed.
FWIW, this isn’t an accurate summary of what happened with the Lena image at all, and the story and reasons behind it’s decline are easily available online. If you want to understand it, maybe it’s worth looking up?
Lena is publicly on board with the movement to stop using her image for research, and it is irrelevant that Playboy has waived their copyrights. The reasons the image is discouraged are to promote professionalism, diversity, and respect in research. The journal Nature says “the Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote women undertaking higher education in science and engineering”. [1] The paper “On alternatives to Lenna says “ Whatever its merits, the Lenna image’s origin is incompatible with our community’s sincere attempts to encourage diversity and respect in Science and Technology”. [2] (And references “ A centerfold does not belong in the classroom”. [3])
It’s more or less the same as hanging pin-ups at work- most people understand why that’s a bad idea, regardless of whether it was acceptable in the past. Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive. Just because some people might not care doesn’t mean everyone is okay with it, and even if you don’t care about it, it’s still clearly unprofessional.
I’m sure it’s completely unintentional and that you and parent comment don’t mean to sound unsupportive of our social advances of women. I’m sure like most people here you actively support and encourage women to learn and work in STEM fields, and advocate for equality. So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold...
I reject your accusations. Claiming without evidence that the Lena image is harmful is about as absurd as claiming the face of the statue of David is harmful. That's another often used picture, and of course completely ignored by the breathless "sexism!" yellers.
David wasn’t made with the intent to be pornographic. Lena’s picture was. Being unaware of the evidence doesn’t mean there isn’t any. There’s plenty of evidence of the mild bias inherent in the use of Lena, if you actually want to find the evidence. Lots of women have mentioned their mild discomfort with seeing it in a professional setting. There’s a documentary about this story called “Losing Lena”.
When someone experiences "mild discomfort" when seeing David (it does display an idealized nude man, which could also be said about the Lena photo, which is far too artistic to be merely called "pornography") then this is still no reason to banish the David photo. If everything gets banned that someone could potentially be mildly offended by, then we would have to ban a hell of a lot of images in research and academia. Another commenter made a comparison to Christian puritanism. A devout Christian might be offended both by Lena and by David. Or think of a devout Muslim woman being deeply offended by the sight of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
A nonsecular humanist could take issue with religious imagery, whether the model was fairly paid, and the articles. All NN (Non-Nude) references are suspect.
"A Utah school district has removed the Bible from some schools' shelves" (2023) https://www.npr.org/2023/06/02/1179906120/utah-bible-book-ch...
Persons from Utah, are even there good examples of healthy very-heteronormative marriages in the aforementioned now unmentionable text?
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(All humans have those. New York already fought for their legal right to public anatomy, too.)
Are there higher resolution test images for ML? Maybe something inanimate that can't be judged and thus can't go to heavem anyway.
sklearn.datasets.load_iris, load_digits, : https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/toy_dataset.html
Sklearn.datasets sample images has an image of a flower but not a USA!: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/datasets/loading_other_datas...
The W3C RDF Primer could describe Shape rdfs:Class'es instead of People and their contact information rdfs:Property(s). An Object-Oriented Programming and Linked Data exercise: Arrange these Classes into a hierarchy, according to their features: Shape, Square, Rectangle, Triangle, Quadrilateral, Triangle.
> Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation
Pixar!
Pixar in a Box curriculum: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar
AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model: https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... : BlenderGPT, Blender-GPT,
Pixar > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar :
> [...] Coincidentally, one of Steve Jobs's first jobs was under Bushnell in 1973 as a technician at his other company Atari, which Bushnell sold to Warner Communications in 1976 to focus on PTT.[22] PTT would later go bankrupt in 1984 and be acquired by ShowBiz Pizza Place.[23]
PTT: Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatres
Pizza Planet! (Toy Story (1995))
Adobe Inc. > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#History
Gravitational Machines
It's an article from 1962:
"After the detection of the gravitational wave GW170817, Jason T. Wright (Physics Today, 72, 5, 12, 2019) reminded the community that many of its features had been predicted by Dyson more than half a century earlier. Dyson’s article was published only once, in Cameron’s long out of print collection, though a scan may be found at the web site of the Gravity Research Foundation (https://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org). Dyson thought it had been reprinted (in his Selected Papers, AMS Press, 1996, forward by Elliot H. Lieb) but it was not. Hoping to make the article easier to find, I wrote Dyson for his permission to post it at the arXiv"
It's about using two big bodies, A and B, to accelerate objects: "The energy source of the machine is the gravitational potential between the stars A and B. As the machine continues to operate, the stars A and B will gradually be drawn closer together, their negative potential energy will increase and their orbital velocity V will also increase."
Nice idea.
I wonder if one could calculate an upper bound of the available potential gravitational energy available in the entire universe by estimating how far every massive point (baryon) is from all the others.
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What is the issue with this comment?
https://chat.openai.com/share/39580cd0-b5b2-4bec-89d4-09297c...
“[…] 5. Perceived Irrelevance or Lack of Relevance: Depending on the context of the Hacker News post, copy-pasting AI-generated content might be seen as irrelevant or not contributing to the topic at hand. This can be frustrating for users who are looking for meaningful and relevant insights from other community members.”
If I wanted to know what Bard or ChatGPT had to say about this, I would ask them.
But you don't know to ask: that's the problem; They're all trying new QG and dark energy correction factors.
One can't solve 3-body problems without Superfluid Quantum Gravity, thus this that I took the time to add is very relevant.
Not worth helping then.
> One can't solve 3-body problems without Superfluid Quantum Gravity
The article (from 1962) does not predict 3-body accelerations of large masses or particles using current methods (probably because they had not yet been developed at the time).
(Ironically, in context to the rejection of AI methods to summarize superfluid Quantum Gravity for the thread's benefit (and not my own),)
N-body gravity problems are probably best solved by AI methods; it is well understood that there are no known closed-form solutions for n-body gravity problems.
Three body problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
I'd love to see a chatbot try lol. That's all I'll say about that...
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Royal Navy says quantum navigation test a success
This is the most obvious practical application of my PhD topic. A Bose Einstein Condensate is an extremely sensitive detector of gravity- a nuclear submarine could use it to make an ultra-accurate map of the world based on variations in the gravitational constant g. This would remove one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock.
It’s a naval chart that would not require surfacing.
A French postdoc in my lab swore this was the moneymaker for our entire subfield, and it seems he was on to something …
A submarine itself is quite massive, and has big moving parts (e.g. the rotor). The crew has less mass, but it would be very close, and also in constant movement. Wouldn’t this interfere with those measurements? Would they need to stop the engine and play “frozen TikTok” while the measurement device is active?
Surely the influence of some of these sources of noise can be modeled and filtered out. A University of Vienna currently conducts experiments to measure the gravitational force at very small sales, and they already have to do this with things like crowds moving about the city during rush hours.
Sources of Noise?!
Doesn't that mean that the gravitational field is an information storage and transmission medium; a signal channel?
Is it lossy?
Is there a routable signal path to block harassing calls?
Is it slower or cheaper than nonlocal entanglement; like quantum radar?
What is the minimum energy necessary to cause a propagating thresholdable-as-binary pertubation of a gravitational field?
Not a formal definition, but noise is simply the undesirable parts of the output of any information processing device, be it a sensor, an amplifier, or a transmission medium. But on Earth it's simply not practical as such. Gravitational waves observatories are used to detect events such as neutron star or black hole mergers that are otherwise unobservable, but they require an insane level of precision to be detected.
Are there yet any instruments better than LIGO at a lagrangian point outside Earth's atmosphere and the Van Allen radiation belt?
No, there’s nothing yet. I think you‘re thinking about (e)LISA btw.
Here is a link for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...
LISA: Laser Interferometer Space Antenna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant... :
> LISA would be the first dedicated space-based gravitational-wave observatory. It aims to measure gravitational waves directly by using laser interferometry. The LISA concept has a constellation of three spacecraft arranged in an equilateral triangle with sides 2.5 million kilometres long, flying along an Earth-like heliocentric orbit. The distance between the satellites is precisely monitored to detect a passing gravitational wave.[2]
It also says the ESA LISA projected launch date is in year 2037.
Could 3 or 4 cubesats per cluster solve for space-based gravitational wave observation?
CubeSat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat
Li-Fi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi
Could the gravitational wave sensors be mounted on Starlink or OneWeb ULEO Ultra Low Earth Orbit satellites with a 5 year lifecycle? (Also, how sealed and shielded do consumer radio telescopes like Unistellar's eVscope and eQuinox need to be to last a few years in microgravity? Maybe mando blackout noise.)
What is SOTA State of the Art in is it "matter-wave interferometry"?
/? matter-wave interferometry wikipedia: https://www.google.com/search?q=matter-wave+interferometry+w...
/? matter-wave interferometry: https://www.google.com/search?q=matter-wave+interferometry
Can low-cost lasers and Rdyberg atoms e.g. Rydberg Technology solve for [space-based] matter-wave interferometry?
/? from:me LIGO https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40westurner%20ligo :
- "Massive Black Holes Shown to Act Like Quantum Particles" (2022) https://www.quantamagazine.org/massive-black-holes-shown-to-... :
> Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.
- GitHub topic: gravitational-waves: https://github.com/topics/gravitational-waves
Further notes regarding Superfluid Quantum Gravity (instead of dark energy): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36258299
It sure is a medium! One Denver (IIRC) gravitational experiment could measure the field distortion caused by 100,000 people and cars at a local sports arena. [citation needed]
Is there a butterfly effect -like minimum pertubation for gravitational wave propagation through matter or massful things, at least?
Is there something that's low-enough power to not EM-burn a brainstem in a crytographically-keyed medical device with key revocation?
Does a fishing lure bobber on the water produce gravitational waves as part of the n-body gravitational wave fluid field, and how separable are the source wave components with e.g. Quantum Fourier Transform/or and other methods?
Butterfly effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
Chaos theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Quantum chaos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chaos
Superfluid Quantum Gravity:
Backscatter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter
Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone (2007)
Competitors at the time included Nokia (Symbian OS), Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, OpenMoko, and Android; but not Apple Newton OS (1987-1998).
Cisco IOS (for network gear) was created in the 1980s.
It was possible to run Linux on the 1st gen iPod (2001). IIRC the Archos Jukebox also had a 2.5" drive enclosure with audio (and then video on a color LCD) decoding.
Nvidia releases new AI chip with 480GB CPU RAM, 96GB GPU RAM
They also have a turnkey product with 256 of these things.
1 exaflop + 144TB memory
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-dgx-gh20...
I watched Jensen’s announcement for this.
He calls it the worlds largest GPU. It’s just one, giant compute unit.
Unlike super computers, which are highly distributed, Nvidia says this is 140 TERABYTES of UNIFIED MEMORY.
My mind still gets blown just thinking about it. My poor desktop GPU has 4 gigabytes of memory. Heck, it only has 2 terabytes of storage!
It may be presented as seamless unified memory, but it isn’t. Underlying framework still has to figure out how to allocate your data to minimize cross-unit talk. Each unit has independent CPU, GPU and (V)RAM, but units are interconnected via very fast network.
How does this compare to HBM High Bandwidth Memory (and GDDR5)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36211785 :
> EDIT: found answer to my own question in the datasheet: "The NVIDIA Grace CPU combines 72 Neoverse V2 Armv9 cores with up to 480GB of server-class LPDDR5X memory with ECC."
So, this is not stacked RAM like HBM, it's LPDDR5X which a quick search says is 8.5Gbps.
The Open-Source Software in Our Pockets Needs Our Help
It looks like the Federal Source Code policy at sourcecode.cio.gov is 404'ing; though there are many references to the URL [1][2]: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/blob/gh-pag...
[1] https://www.cio.gov/2016/08/11/peoples-code.html
[2] https://code.gov/agency-compliance/compliance/procurement
> Section 7.2 and 7.3 of the Source Code Policy require agencies to provide an inventory of their 'custom-developed code' to support government-wide reuse and make Federal open source code easier to find.
> Using these inventories, Code.gov will provide a platform to search federally funded open source software and software available for government-wide reuse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888037 : security.txt, carbon.txt, SPDX SBOM, OSV, JSON-LD, blockcerts
/? "Critical Technology Security Centers Act" of 2023 https://www.google.com/search?q=Critical%2BTechnology%2BSecu...
Text - H.R.2866 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Critical Technology Security Centers Act of 2023. (2023, April 25). https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2866...
Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative
Every time I see social media recreated in a decentralised fashion I realise why the successful ones are centralised. The loading times of this are dreadful and I don't see how you'll be able to solve that problem when you're relying on P2P.
In any case, it sounds like we'll be getting many new Reddit clones so I may as well plug what I've built recently: a Reddit alternative API that is free. Check it out if you're a dev that is being caught out by the Reddit pricing changes[1].
I don't really find Mastodon that slow.
I do think it's got a lot, lot of sharp edges that need smoothing out before it's really viable. But speed isn't a problem, and it's decentralised.
Japanese Joinery, 3D printing, and FreeCAD
Is anyone aware of attempts at Japanese Joinery 3D printed parts, hopefully using FreeCAD?
https://github.com/topics/joinery :
- chantzlarge/joinery : https://github.com/chantzlarge/joinery
https://github.com/topics/woodworking
- petrasvestartas/compas_wood: https://github.com/petrasvestartas/compas_wood gallery: https://petrasvestartas.github.io/compas_wood/latest/#galler... (Python)
- marialarsson/tsugite: https://github.com/marialarsson/tsugite (Python)
https://github.com/topics/freecad
Japanese carpentry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_carpentry
/? Japanese joinery: https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=japanese+...
New open-source datasets for music-based development
I’ll bite: Anyone doing fun stuff on the personal-music-collection front with these datasets?
I’m a big fan of Picard (via beets), and the ListenBrainz dataset seems like a fun resource for finding new music… but despite being intrigued by the rest of the datasets, I have no clue what I’d ever do with them from a practical standpoint.
"Show HN: Polymath: Convert any music-library into a sample-library with ML" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34756949
Show HN: A Database Generator for EVM with CRUD and On-Chain Indexing
Hey all,
We are working on a database generator that takes in your data schema in YAML format and uses it to generate a database in Solidity with CRUD and on-chain indexing capabilities. You can deploy the generated contracts to any EVM blockchain.
We have a demo and playground if you want to test it out. It's in the early stages, we have planned some exciting features, and we'd appreciate your feedback!
Additional schema languages maybe worth supporting: Arrow, JSONschema, SHACL, json-ld-schema
react-jsonschem-form https://github.com/rjsf-team/react-jsonschema-form
google/react-schemaorg: https://github.com/google/react-schemaorg : Type-checked Schema.org JSON-LD for React
pydantic_schemaorg: https://github.com/lexiq-legal/pydantic_schemaorg
"RDFJS"
YAML-LD (application/ld+yaml) round-trips to JSON-LD (application/ld+json) which round trips to RDF; W3C Linked Data Signatures / W3C Verified Claims cryptographic signatures verify regardless of graph representation.
YAML-LD > 3.1 JSON vs YAML comparison: https://json-ld.github.io/yaml-ld/spec/#json-vs-yaml
Could there be on-chain indexes / indices for Linked Data documents?
rdflib-leveldb: https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib-leveldb https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib-leveldb/blob/a0f3386c71e6b1...
Fwiu, "e.g. Graph token (GRT) supports Indexing (search) and Curation of datasets"
Could an code generated with SolidQuery serve Certificate Transparency logs and e.g. Sigstore artifact signatures? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32760170 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-32760170 :
> Google's Certificate Transparency Search page to be discontinued May 15th, 2022" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781698
> - LetsEncrypt Oak is also powered by Google/trillian, which is a trustful centralized database
See also: cosmos/iavl
> - e.g. Graph token (GRT) supports Indexing (search) and Curation of datasets
>> And what about indexing and search queries at volume, again without replication?
> My understanding is that the s Sigstore folks are now more open to the idea of a trustless DLT? "W3C Verifiable Credentials" is a future-proof standardized way to sign RDF (JSON-LD,) documents with DIDs.
WebNN: Web Neural Network API
W3C WebNN
- Src: https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn
- Spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/
WebNN API: https://www.w3.org/TR/webnn/#api
Vectorization: Introduction
> Vectorization is a process by which floating-point computations in scientific code are compiled into special instructions that execute elementary operations (+,-,*, etc.) or functions (exp, cos, etc.) in parallel on fixed-size vector arrays.
I guess this is a scientific computing course or something but I feel like even so it’s important to point out that most processors have many vector instructions that operate on integers, bitfields, characters, and the like. The fundamental premise of “do a thing on a bunch of data at once” isn’t limited to just floating point operations.
Vectorization (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorization :
> Array programming, a style of computer programming where operations are applied to whole arrays instead of individual elements
> Automatic vectorization, a compiler optimization that transforms loops to vector operations
> Image tracing, the creation of vector from raster graphics
> Word embedding, mapping words to vectors, in natural language processing
> Vectorization (mathematics), a linear transformation which converts a matrix into a column vector
Vector (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector
> Vector (mathematics and physics):
> Row and column vectors, single row or column matrices
> Vector space
> Vector field, a vector for each point
And then there are a number of CS usages of the word vector for 1D arrays.
Compute kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_kernel
GPGPU > Vectorization, Stream Processing > Compute kernels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :
> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPt, numexpr,]
pyorch lambdify PR, sympytorch: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/20516#issuecomment-78428...
sympytorch: https://github.com/patrick-kidger/sympytorch :
> Turn SymPy expressions into PyTorch Modules.
> SymPy floats (optionally) become trainable parameters. SymPy symbols are inputs to the Module.
sympy2jax https://github.com/MilesCranmer/sympy2jax :
> Turn SymPy expressions into parametrized, differentiable, vectorizable, JAX functions.
> All SymPy floats become trainable input parameters. SymPy symbols become columns of a passed matrix.
[deleted]
You can link an OpenPGP key to a German eID
Is there a reputable identity provider that would verify a passport, SSN or similar, preferably in person, and link that to an OpenPGP key with metadata same as in the ID?
Similar to this service, but linking not just the name, but more secure unique identity data. Linking the person’s name to the key is not very useful, since there are many people with that name.
That’s basically a government issued smart card, that would allow the use of OpenPGP A-E-S keys for arbitrary data through a FOSS API.
Keybase was a good idea, but it’s semi dead.
It's not exactly what you're saying but
Is all the best ideas of keybase. Basically if you trust someone has control over multiple different accounts you can also trust their pgp key.
Re: WoT Web of Trust, `keybase pgp -h`, and Web standards: W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers, W3C VC Verifiable Credentials, "Linked Data Signatures for GPG"; there's a URI for the GpgSignature2020 signature suite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35302650
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26758099 ; blockcerts.org, blockcerts-verifier-js, ILP ledger addresses
"Verifiable Credentials Data Model v1.1" W3C Recommendation 03 March 2022 https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/#ecosystem-overview :
> Holder, Issuer, Subject, Verifier, Verifiable Data Registry
Evaluate and Track Your LLM Experiments: Introducing TruLens for LLMs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35810320 :
> - [ ] dvc, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Gitea Actions,: how to add PROV RDF Linked Data metadata to workflows like DVC.org's & container+command-in-YAML approach
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619424 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-34619424 :
- XAI: Explainable AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelli...
- > Right to explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation
- > A more logged approach with IDK all previous queries in a notebook and their output over time would be more scientific-like and thus closer to "Engineering": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
This Is Why I Teach My Law Students How to Hack
def hasRight(person): -> bool
def haveEqualRights(persons): ->
A blocky based CAD program
What a great idea.
TIL about jupyterlab-blockly https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://jupyterlab-blockly.readthedocs.io/en/latest/other_ex... :
> The JupyterLab-Blockly extension is ready to be used as a base for other projects: you can register new Blocks, Toolboxes and Generators. It is a great tool for fast prototyping."
jupyter-cadquery: https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery
"Generate code from GUI interactions" https://github.com/Kanaries/pygwalker/issues/90
Why cadquery instead of OpenSCAD: https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cad...
/? awesome finite element analysis site:github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+finite+element+analy...
AI Game Development Tools (AI-GDT) > 3D Model https://github.com/Yuan-ManX/ai-game-development-tools#3d-mo... :
> blender_jarvis - Control Blender through text prompts with help of ChatGPT*
> Blender-GPT - An all-in-one Blender assistant powered by GPT3/4 + Whisper [speech2text] integration
> BlenderGPT
> chatGPT-maya - Simple Maya tool that utilizes open AI to perform basic tasks based on descriptive instructions.
Removing PGP from PyPI
>Of those 1069 unique keys, about 30% of them were not discoverable on major public keyservers, making it difficult or impossible to meaningfully verify those signatures.
I don't know if it applies to any of those 1069 keys, but note that there is a way of hosting PGP keys that does not depend on key servers: WKD https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-s... . You host the key at a .well-known URI under the domain of the email address. It's a draft as you can see, but I've seen a few people using it (including myself), and GnuPG supports it.
This is interesting, but it doesn't really solve the key distribution problem: with well-known hosting you now have a (weak) binding to some DNS path, but you're not given any indication of how to discover that path. It's also not clear that a DNS identity is beneficial to PyPI in particular (since PyPI doesn't associate or namespace packages at all w/r/t DNS).
More generally, these kinds of improvements are not a sufficient reason to retain PGP: even with a sensible identity binding and key distribution, PGP is still a mess under the hood. The security of a codesigning scheme is always the weakest signature and/or key, and PGP's flexibility more or less ensures that that weakest link will always be extremely weak.
Right. I've never used PyPI, but TFA makes it sound like the existing support for signing is "We allow the uploader to upload a signature, and the downloader can look up the key indicated in the signature to do the verification." Is that correct? If so, then yes there is a key ID involved but no email address, so a generic downloader would have no choice but to look it up from a key server.
That's correct!
PyPI's support for PGP is very old -- it's hard to get an exact date, but I think it's been around since the very earliest versions of the index (well before it was a storing index like it is now). If I had to guess (speculate wildly), my guess would be that the original implementation was done with a healthy SKS network and strong set in mind -- without those things, PGP's already weak identity primitives are more or less nonexistent with just signatures.
GPG ASC upload support was quietly added later IIRC. EWDurbin might recall
Well, I think there should be broader discussion of this inadequacy.
"Implement "hook" support for package signature verification." (2013) https://github.com/pypi/warehouse/issues/1638#issuecomment-2...
"GPG signing - how does that really work with PyPI?" https://github.com/pypa/twine/issues/157#issuecomment-101460...
"Better integration with conda/conda-forge for building packages" https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/795#issuecomment-1...
Conda now has their own package cryptographic signature software supply chain security control control. Unfortunately, conda's isn't yet W3D DIDs with Verifiable Credentials and sigstore either.
Also, [CycloneDX] SBOMs don't have any package archive or package file signatures; so when you try to audit what software you have on all the containers on your infrastructure there's no way to check the cryptographic signatures of the package authors and maintainers against what's installed on disk.
docker help sbom
# check_signatures python conda zipapps apt/dnf/brew/chocolatey_nuget git /usr/local
Now that you have removed GPG ASC signature upload support, is there any way for publishers to add cryptographic signatures to packages that they upload to pypi? FWIU only "the server signs uploads" part of TUF was ever implemented?
Why do we use GPG ASC signatures instead of just a checksum over the same channel?
> Why do we use GPG ASC signatures instead of just a checksum over the same channel?
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? PyPI computes and supplies a digest for every uploaded distribution, so you can already cross-check integrity for any hosted distribution.
GPG was nominally meant to provide authenticity for distributions, but it never really served this purpose. That's why it's being removed.
> Why do we use GPG ASC signatures instead of just a checksum over the same channel?
You can include an md5sum or a sha512sum string next to the URL that the package is downloaded from (for users to optionally check after downloading a package); but if that checksum string is uploaded over the same channel (HTTPS/TLS w/ a CA cert bundle) as the package, the checksum string could have been MITM'd/tampered with, too. A cryptographically-signed checksum can be verified once the pubkey is retrieved over a different channel (GPG: HKP is HTTPS/TLS with cert pinning IIRC), and a MITM would have to spend a lot of money to forge that digital publisher signature.
Twine COULD/SHOULD download uploads to check the PyPI TUF signature, which could/should be shipped as a const in twine?
And then Twine should check publisher signatures against which trusted map of package names to trusted keys?
1) the server signs what's uploaded using one or more TUF keys shared to RAM on every pypi upload server.
2) the client uploads a cryptographic signature (made using their own key) along with the package, and the corresponding public key is trusted to upload for that package name, and the client retrieves said public key and verifies the downloaded package's cryptographic signature before installing.
FWIU, 1 (PyPI signs uploads with TUF) was implemented, but 2 (users sign their own packages before uploading the signed package and signature, (and then 1)) was never implemented?
Your understanding is a little off: we worked on integrating TUF into PyPI for a while, but ran into some scalability/distributability issues with the reference implementation. It's been a few years, but my recollection was that the reference implementation assumed a lot of local filesystem state, which wasn't compatible with Warehouse's deployment (no local state other than tempfiles, everything in object storage).
To the best of my knowledge, the current state of TUF for PyPI is that we performed a trusted setup ceremony for the TUF roots[1], but that no signatures were ever produced from those roots.
For the time being, we're looking at solutions that have less operational overhead: Sigstore[2] is the main one, and it uses TUF under the hood to provide the root of trust.
python-tuf [1] back then assumed that everything was manipulated locally, yes, but a lot has changed since then: you can now read/write metadata entirely in memory, and integrate with different key management backend systems such as GCP.
More importantly, I should point out that while Sigstore's Fulcio will help with key management (think of it as a managed GPG, if you will), it will not help with securely mapping software projects to their respective OIDC identities. Without this, how will verifiers know in a secure yet scalable way which Fulcio keys _should_ be used? Otherwise, we would then be back to the GPG PKI problem with its web of trust.
This is where PEP 480 [2] can help: you can use TUF (especially after TAP 18 [3]) to do this secure mapping. Marina Moore has also written a proposal called Transparent TUF [4] for having Sigstore manage such a TUF repository for registries like PyPI. This is not to mention the other benefits that TUF can give you (e.g., protection from freeze, rollback, and mix-and-match attacks). We should definitely continue discussing this sometime.
[1] https://github.com/theupdateframework/python-tuf
[2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0480/
[3] https://github.com/theupdateframework/taps/blob/master/tap18...
[4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPOXLMV1ASQryTRZJbdg3wWR...
> [4] [TUFT: Transparent TUFT] : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPOXLMV1ASQryTRZJbdg3wWR...
W3C ReSpec: https://github.com/w3c/respec/wiki
blockcerts-verifier (JS): https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/blockcerts-verifi...
blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier (Python): https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896445 :
> Can SubtleCrypto accelerate any of the W3C Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0 APIs? vc-data-integrity: https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-integrity/ ctrl-f "signature suite"
>> ISSUE: Avoid signature format proliferation by using text-based suite value The pattern that Data Integrity Signatures use presently leads to a proliferation in signature types and JSON-LD Contexts. This proliferation can be avoided without any loss of the security characteristics of tightly binding a cryptography suite version to one or more acceptable public keys. The following signature suites are currently being contemplated: eddsa-2022, nist-ecdsa-2022, koblitz-ecdsa-2022, rsa-2022, pgp-2022, bbs-2022, eascdsa-2022, ibsa-2022, and jws-2022.
https://github.com/theupdateframework/taps/blob/master/tap18... :
> TUF "targets" roles may delegate to Fulcio identities instead of private keys, and these identities (and the corresponding certificates) may be used for verification.
s/fulcio/W3C DID/g may have advantages, or is there already a way to use W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers to keep track of key material in RDFS properties of a DID class?
Where does the user specify the cryptographic key to sign a package before uploading?
Serverside TUF keys are implemented FWICS, but clientside digital publisher signatures (like e.g. MS Windows .exe's have had when you view the "Properties" of the file for many years now) are not yet implemented.
Hopefully I'm just out of date.
> Where does the user specify the cryptographic key to sign a package before uploading?
With Sigstore, they perform an OIDC flow against an identity provider: that results in a verifiable identity credential, which is then bound to a short-lived (~15m) signing key that produces the signatures. That signing key is simultaneously attested through a traditional X.509 PKI (it gets a certificate, that certificate is uploaded to an append-only transparency log, etc.).
So: in the normal flow, the user never directly specifies the cryptographic key -- the scheme ensures that they have a strong, ephemeral one generated for them on the spot (and only on their client device, in RAM). That key gets bound to their long-lived identity, so verifiers don't need to know which key they're verifying; they only need to determine whether they trust the identity itself (which can be an email address, a GitHub repository, etc.).
Signature tells you who signed it.
Of course, if you haven't put any effort in system to end-to-end verify whether it's right signature it doesn't matter.
pip checks that a given was signed with the pypi key but does not check for a signature from the publisher. And now there's no way to host any type of cryptographic signatures on pypi.
There is no e2e: pypi signs what's uploaded.
(Noting also that packages don't have to be encrypted in order to have cryptographic signatures; only the signature is encrypted, not the whole package)
Yeah the whole thing looks like throwing away baby with bathwater; the package should
* get a signature for author ("the actual author published it") + some metadata with list of valid signing keys (in case project have more authors or just for key rotation * get a signature for hosting provider that confirms "yes, that actual user logged in and uploaded the package" * (the hardest part) key management on client side so the user have to do least amount of work possible in when downloading/updating valid package.
If user doesn't want to go to effort to validate whether the public key of author is valid so be it but at very least system should alert on tampering with the provider (checking the hosting signature) or the author key changing (compromised credentials to the hosting provider).
It still doesn't prevent "the attacker steals key off author's machine" but that is by FAR the rarest case and could be pretty reasonably prevented by just using hardware tokens. Hell, fund them for key contributors.
Nginx 1.25.0: experimental HTTP/3 support
HTTP/3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3
QUIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC
DoQ: DNS-over-QUIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Transport_p...
RFC9520: DNS over Dedicated QUIC Connections: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9250
If perpetual motion machines don't exist, what powers earth's natural systems?
Earth's rotation > Origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation#Origin :
> Earth's original rotation was a vestige of the original angular momentum of the cloud of dust, rocks, and gas that coalesced to form the Solar System. This primordial cloud was composed of hydrogen and helium produced in the Big Bang, as well as heavier elements ejected by supernovas. As this interstellar dust is heterogeneous, any asymmetry during gravitational accretion resulted in the angular momentum of the eventual planet. [58]
> However, if the giant-impact hypothesis for the origin of the Moon is correct, this primordial rotation rate would have been reset by the Theia impact 4.5 billion years ago. Regardless of the speed and tilt of Earth's rotation before the impact, it would have experienced a day some five hours long after the impact. [59] Tidal effects would then have slowed this rate to its modern value.
Solar energy: fission, fusion; [thermal] radiation,: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy
Circumstellar habitable zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone :
> In astronomy and astrobiology, the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), or simply the habitable zone, is the range of orbits around a star within which a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure. [1][2][3][4][5] The bounds of the CHZ are based on Earth's position in the Solar System and the amount of radiant energy it receives from the Sun.
Earth > Hydrosphere, Atmosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth :
> Earth's hydrosphere is the sum of Earth's water and its distribution. Most of Earth's hydrosphere consists of Earth's global ocean. Nevertheless, Earth's hydrosphere also consists of water in the atmosphere and on land, including clouds, inland seas, lakes, rivers, and underground waters down to a depth of 2,000 m (6,600 ft).
Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages
I was super excited at this, but digging through the release [0] one can see the following [1]. While using Bible translations is indeed better than nothing, I don't think the stylistic choices in the Bible are representative of how people actually speak the language, in any of the languages I can speak (i.e. that I am able to evaluate personally).
Religious recordings tend to be liturgical, so even the pronunciation might be different to the everyday language. They do address something related, although more from a vocabulary perspective to my understanding [2].
So one of their stated goals, to enable people to talk to AI in their preferred language [3], might be closer but certainly a stretch to achieve with their chosen dataset.
[0]: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/ai-massively-multilingual-...
[1]: > These translations have publicly available audio recordings of people reading these texts in different languages. As part of the MMS project, we created a dataset of readings of the New Testament in more than 1,100 languages, which provided on average 32 hours of data per language. By considering unlabeled recordings of various other Christian religious readings, we increased the number of languages available to more than 4,000. While this data is from a specific domain and is often read by male speakers, our analysis shows that our models perform equally well for male and female voices. And while the content of the audio recordings is religious, our analysis shows that this doesn’t bias the model to produce more religious language.
[2]: > And while the content of the audio recordings is religious, our analysis shows that this doesn’t bias the model to produce more religious language.
[3]: > This kind of technology could be used for VR and AR applications in a person’s preferred language and that can understand everyone’s voice.
This paragraph justifies the decision, IMHO.
> Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge because the largest existing speech datasets cover 100 languages at most. To overcome this, we turned to religious texts, such as the Bible, that have been translated in many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for text-based language translation research.
I think the choice was just between having any data at all, or not being able to support that language.
While AFAIU the UN: UDHR United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the most-translated document in the world, relative to the given training texts there likely hasn't been as much subjective translation analysis of UDHR.
Awesome-legal-nlp links to benchmarks like LexGLUE and FairLex but not yet LegalBench; in re: AI alignment and ethics / regional law https://github.com/maastrichtlawtech/awesome-legal-nlp#bench...
A "who hath done it" exercise:
[For each of these things, tell me whether God, Others, or You did it:] https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1641842843973976082?
"Did God do this?"
The UN's UDHR likely yields <5mins of audio data in any language which is kinda useless as far as training data goes.
Compared to e.g. religious text translation, I don't know how much subjective analysis there is for UDHR translations. It's pretty cut and dry: e.g. "Equal Protection of Equal Rights" is pretty clear.
"About the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Translation Project" https://www.ohchr.org/en/human-rights/universal-declaration/... :
> At present, there are 555 different translations available in HTML and/or PDF format.
E.g. Buddhist scriptures are also multiply translated; probably with more coverage in East Asian languages.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the US Declaration of Independence, had read into Transcendental Buddhism and FWIU is thus significantly responsible for the religious (and nonreligious) freedom We appreciate in the United States today.
Weapons contractors hitting Department of Defense with inflated prices
[flagged]
> is it any wonder we see mainstream media enthusiastically endorsing more and more weapons for Ukraine? this is your "textbook" demonstration of the military-industrial-complex
I love how people are so jaded when America is on the right side of a conflict for the first time in a long time. America is supplying aid to a country to defend itself from an imperialistic invader, it gets to get rid of its expiring weapon stocks by donating them to a country that is decimating their biggest military rival.
This arrangement is win win win for everyone involved.
[flagged]
This narrative does not jive with my memory. There were extremely vocal critics of the invasion of Iraq, long before troops were on the ground. Some of the U.S. closest allies refused to participate. Much of the international community was opposed to the invasion, even with the U.S. doing whatever it could to push for a coalition.
Comparing the invasion of Iraq with the current situation in Ukraine is like comparing apples with hand grenades.
> This narrative does not jive with my memory.
In the years since, lots of people came out and said "they were always against the war" likely creating false memories. Here is one example, it's very common: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/09/bidens-record-on-iraq-war/
The war went on for decades, during that time both Democrats and Republicans had control of the presidency and congress at various points, nobody saw fit to even bring a vote to end the war. They would go years without mentioning it, and now that they want to start another they "were always against it" all of the sudden.
Public opinion was really 50-50 [1] in the US so you're going to hear a lot of people that say they were against it because a lot of people were.
Of course, it went from a high of 2/3 for to now 2/3 against so the 1/3 flip-flopers will also be a lot of people.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United_S...
List of congressional opponents of the Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_congressional_opponent...
That administration increased expenses by trillions and then cut tax revenue by trillions ( "starve the beast", "scorched earth") and now we're at shutdown showdown again without money for healthcare, infrastructure, or education.
We need to fund Q12 and K12CS education and update curricula to win the actual competition. Without funding due to defense offense spending without ROI, we cannot fund education and will thus also lose the real war: the War on Healthcare.
Repeal of the 2002 AUMF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_the_2002_AUMF
Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Report_on_Iraqi_WMD_Int...
Had they floated "we're going to start multi-trillion-dollar war and cut then cut taxes" in the election, I doubt they would've won Florida by a hanging chad in 1999. .
(The full cost of war calculations should include lifetime medical for now-disabled veterans, whose families also need healthcare.)
I think you should pay the bills for your war now.
FWIW the initial requested outlay to relieve them of apparently over-spec mortar tubes / new wmd production was ~$80b in 2003.
Real costs of war included fuel surcharges on groceries, which increased CPI (Consumer Price Inflation) and stressed families' budgets leading into to The Great Recession; then the worst recession since the great depression (1929-1939) prior to WWII (1939-1945).
The actual impact on the (OPEC-specified) production rate (not price) of oil due to tbh relatively minimal Iraqi production capabilities having been offline due to US invasion in order to world police save the day does not at all explain the action in the oil commodity market through those years; costs of war calculations - after deaths and orphans and missed school person/years - do not include what we paid for gas at the pump.
The Great Recession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession
World oil market chronology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_fr... ; from $30/barrel in 2000 to $140/barrel in 2008 (and DoD is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world, especially when at war)
PyTorch for WebGPU
Very impressive work. Would be interesting to do some benchmarks versus PyTorch.
On a side-note, I'm not sure if it is because I've looked at so many autograd engines by now, but it is really cool to see that after the years of different frameworks having been developed, most people seem to agree on some concepts and structure on how to implement something like this. It is pretty easy to dive into this, even without being particularly skilled in JS/TS.
Wondering how such frameworks will look in a couple years.
Could there be something like emscripten-forge/requests-wasm-polyfill for PyTorch with WebGPU? https://github.com/emscripten-forge/requests-wasm-polyfill
How does the performance of webgpu-torch compare to compiling PyTorch to WASM with emscripten and WebGPU?
tfjs benchmarks: Environment > backend > {WASM, WebGL, CPU, WebGPU, tflite} https://tensorflow.github.io/tfjs/e2e/benchmarks/local-bench... src: https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/e2e/benchmark...
tensorflow/tfjs https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs
tfjs-backend-wasm https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/tfjs-backend-...
tfjs-backend-webgpu https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/tfjs-backend-...
([...], tflite-support, tflite-micro)
From facebookresearch/shumai (a JS tensor library) https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai/issues/122 :
> It doesn't make sense to support anything besides WebGPU at this point. WASM + SIMD is around 15-20x slower on my machine[1]. Although WebGL is more widely supported today, it doesn't have the compute features needed for efficient modern ML (transformers etc) and will likely be a deprecated backend for other frameworks when WebGPU comes online.
tensorflow rust has a struct.Tensor: https://tensorflow.github.io/rust/tensorflow/struct.Tensor.h...
"ONNX Runtime merges WebGPU backend" https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35696031 ... TIL about wonnx: https://github.com/webonnx/wonnx#in-the-browser-using-webgpu...
microsoft/onnxruntime: https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime
Apache/arrow has language-portable Tensors for cpp: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/cpp/api/tensor.html and rust: https://docs.rs/arrow/latest/arrow/tensor/struct.Tensor.html and Python: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/api/tables.html#tensors https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/generated/pyarrow.Tenso...
Fwiw it looks like the llama.cpp Tensor is from ggml, for which there are CUDA and OpenCL implementations (but not yet ROCm, or a WebGPU shim for use with emscripten transpilation to WASM): https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/ggml.h
Are the recommendable ways to cast e.g. arrow Tensors to pytorch/tensorflow?
FWIU, Rust has a better compilation to WASM; and that's probably faster than already-compiled-to-JS/ES TensorFlow + WebGPU.
What's a fair benchmark?
> What's a fair benchmark?
- /? pytorch tensorflow benchmarks webgpu 2023 site:github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=pytorch+tensorflow+benchmark...
- [tfjs benchmarks]
- huggingface/transformers:src/transformers/benchmark https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/main/src/tr...
Tell HN: The next generation of videogames will be great with midjourney
carson-katri/dream-textures (Stable Diffusion, Blender) https://github.com/carson-katri/dream-textures
nv-tlabs/GET3D https://github.com/nv-tlabs/GET3D
/? midjourney stable diffusion DALL-E "Imagen" comparison https://www.google.com/search?q=midjourney+stable+diffusion+...
"Google will label fake images created with its [Imagen] A.I" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896000
"Show HN: Polymath: Convert any music-library into a sample-library with ML" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34782526 :
> Other cool #aiart things:
JavaScript state machines and statecharts
State machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine
https://docs.viewflow.io/bpmn/index.html :
> Unlike Finite state machine based workflow, BPMN allows parallel task execution, and suitable to model real person collaboration patterns.
BPMN: Business Process Model and Notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Model_and_Not...
On the difference between the map and the territory.
> - Can TLA+ find side-channels (which bypass all software memory protection features other than encryption-in-RAM)?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617335 :
>> Can there still be side channel attacks in formally verified systems? Can e.g. TLA+ help with that at all?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563857 :
> - TLA+ Model checker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA%2B#Model_checker :
>> The TLC model checker builds a finite state model of TLA+ specifications for checking invariance properties
This library implements Harel state charts, which are a superset of FSMs that allow for parallel and nested states.
Not sure what TLA+ has to do with either.
Rising number of lithium battery incidents on airplanes worry crew
"Researchers craft a fully edible battery" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35885696
The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church–Turing–Deutsch_principl... :
> In computer science and quantum physics, the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle (CTD principle) is a stronger, physical form of the Church–Turing thesis formulated by David Deutsch in 1985.[1] The principle states that a universal computing device can simulate every physical process.
Are qubits enough to simulate qudits and qutrits?
Run Llama 13B with a 6GB graphics card
From skimming, it looks like this approach requires CUDA and thus is Nvidia only.
Anyone have a recommended guide for AMD / Intel GPUs? I gather the 4 bit quantization is the special sauce for CUDA, but I’d guess there’d be something comparable for not-CUDA?
4-bit quantization is to reduce the amount of VRAM required to run the model. You can run it 100% on CPU if you don't have CUDA. I'm not aware of any AMD equivalent yet.
Looks like there are several projects that implement the CUDA interface for various other compute systems, e.g.:
https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY/blob/master/R...
https://github.com/hughperkins/coriander
I have zero experience with these, though.
"Democratizing AI with PyTorch Foundation and ROCm™ support for PyTorch" (2023) https://pytorch.org/blog/democratizing-ai-with-pytorch/ :
> AMD, along with key PyTorch codebase developers (including those at Meta AI), delivered a set of updates to the ROCm™ open software ecosystem that brings stable support for AMD Instinct™ accelerators as well as many Radeon™ GPUs. This now gives PyTorch developers the ability to build their next great AI solutions leveraging AMD GPU accelerators & ROCm. The support from PyTorch community in identifying gaps, prioritizing key updates, providing feedback for performance optimizing and supporting our journey from “Beta” to “Stable” was immensely helpful and we deeply appreciate the strong collaboration between the two teams at AMD and PyTorch. The move for ROCm support from “Beta” to “Stable” came in the PyTorch 1.12 release (June 2022)
> [...] PyTorch ecosystem libraries like TorchText (Text classification), TorchRec (libraries for recommender systems - RecSys), TorchVision (Computer Vision), TorchAudio (audio and signal processing) are fully supported since ROCm 5.1 and upstreamed with PyTorch 1.12.
> Key libraries provided with the ROCm software stack including MIOpen (Convolution models), RCCL (ROCm Collective Communications) and rocBLAS (BLAS for transformers) were further optimized to offer new potential efficiencies and higher performance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34399633 :
>> AMD ROcm supports Pytorch, TensorFlow, MlOpen, rocBLAS on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs: https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learni...
https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch :
> Intel® Extension for PyTorch extends PyTorch with up-to-date features optimizations for an extra performance boost on Intel hardware. Optimizations take advantage of AVX-512 Vector Neural Network Instructions (AVX512 VNNI) and Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX) on Intel CPUs as well as Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines on Intel discrete GPUs. Moreover, through PyTorch xpu device, Intel® Extension for PyTorch provides easy GPU acceleration for Intel discrete GPUs with PyTorch
https://pytorch.org/blog/celebrate-pytorch-2.0/ (2023) :
> As part of the PyTorch 2.0 compilation stack, TorchInductor CPU backend optimization brings notable performance improvements via graph compilation over the PyTorch eager mode.
> The TorchInductor CPU backend is sped up by leveraging the technologies from the Intel® Extension for PyTorch for Conv/GEMM ops with post-op fusion and weight prepacking, and PyTorch ATen CPU kernels for memory-bound ops with explicit vectorization on top of OpenMP-based thread parallelization
DLRS Deep Learning Reference Stack: https://intel.github.io/stacks/dlrs/index.html
Matter Raspberry Pi GPIO Commander – Turn Your Pi into a Matter Lighting Device
(Context: Matter is an application layer protocol to control smart home devices, bring them into your Wifi or Thread network, and they ought to work with Homekit/Google Home/Alexa/Smartthings/Home Assistant etc. at the same time)
I'm currently working on a Matter device myself and the overengineering is unreal.
The idea is great (standardized messages over IP, no internet required, open source SDK on Github) but if they had just used MQTT with some standardized JSON messages and two or three fixed onboarding flows it would have solved the same problems with 1% of the effort.
But now the project is absolutely massive, almost 1k pages for the base spec, 1M+ lines of (mostly C++) code for the core SDK, no stable or even well defined API, almost no documentation. Progress is glacial, unsuprisingly. Bug fixes do not seem to be backported to older release branches but there is no source code compatibility either, so the security story will be interesting for sure...
Most discussions seem to happen on an internal Discord server and Wiki for paying members only, so the project is not that open either.
I really hope that the entire thing gets scrapped and a simpler approach will rise from the ashes...
> I really hope that the entire thing gets scrapped and a simpler approach will rise from the ashes...
Do we need a new thing? ZigBee and mqtt already exist. Maybe something a little nicer over IP networks?
"Securing name resolution in the IoT: DNS over CoAP" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186286
From https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip#architecture... :
> Matter aims to build a universal IPv6-based communication protocol for smart home devices. The protocol defines the application layer that will be deployed on devices and the different link layers to help maintain interoperability. The following diagram illustrates the normal operational mode of the stack:
> [...] It is built with market-proven technologies using Internet Protocol (IP) and is compatible with Thread and Wi-Fi network transports.
> Matter was developed by a Working Group within the Connectivity Standards Alliance (Alliance). This Working Group develops and promotes the adoption of the Matter standard, a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. The vision that led major industry players to come together to build Matter is that smart connectivity should be simple, reliable, and interoperable.
> [...] The code examples show simple interactions, and are supported on multiple transports -- Wi-Fi and Thread -- starting with resource-constrained (i.e., memory, processing) silicon platforms to help ensure Matter’s scalability.
Would it make sense to have an mqtt transport for matter? Or a bridge; like homeassistant or similar?
https://github.com/home-assistant/core#featured-integrations lists mqtt
Is there already a good (security) comparison of e.g. http basic auth, x10, ZigBee, mqtt, matter?
Exploring the native use of 64-bit posit arithmetic in scientific computing
Unum (number format) > Posit (Type III Unum) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format) :
> Posits have superior accuracy in the range near one, where most computations occur. This makes it very attractive to the current trend in deep learning to minimise the number of bits used. It potentially helps any application to accelerate by enabling the use of fewer bits (since it has more fraction bits for accuracy) reducing network and memory bandwidth and power requirements.
> [...] Note: 32-bit posit is expected to be sufficient to solve almost all classes of applications [citation needed]
Researchers craft a fully edible battery
"Researchers find major storage capacity in metal-free aqueous batteries" https://www.inceptivemind.com/researchers-finds-major-storag... :
"The role of the electrolyte in non-conjugated radical polymers for metal-free aqueous energy storage electrodes." (2023) DOI: 10.1038/s41563-023-01518-z
"A sustainable battery with a biodegradable electrolyte made from crab shells" (2022) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/09/220901135827.h... :
"A sustainable chitosan-zinc electrolyte for high-rate zinc-metal batteries" (2022) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2022.07.015
Chitosan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitosan :
> Chitosan /ˈkaɪtəsæn/ is a linear polysaccharide composed of randomly distributed β-(1→4)-linked D-glucosamine (deacetylated unit) and N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (acetylated unit). It is made by treating the chitin shells of shrimp and other crustaceans with an alkaline substance, such as sodium hydroxide.
Is there a sustainable way to produce Chitosan, which is an electrolyte?
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Ctrl-F "anode" :
> Here's a discussion about the lower costs of hemp supercapacitors as compared with graphene super capacitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16814022
"Why Salt Water may be the Future of Batteries" https://youtu.be/vm2hNNA4lvM ($5/kwh, energy density, desalinization too, graphene production too)
Flow battery > Other types > Membraneless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery#Other_types
MSG is the most misunderstood ingredient of the century. That’s finally changing
MSG: Monosodium Glutamate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
Glutamate–glutamine cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate%E2%80%93glutamine_cy...
"Multiple Mechanistically Distinct Modes of Endoc annabinoid Mobilization at Central Amygdala Glutamatergic Synapses" (2014) https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(14)00017-8
Glutamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamine :
> Glutamine is synthesized by the enzyme glutamine synthetase from glutamate and ammonia. The most relevant glutamine-producing tissue is the muscle mass, accounting for about 90% of all glutamine synthesized. Glutamine is also released, in small amounts, by the lungs and brain. [20] Although the liver is capable of relevant glutamine synthesis, its role in glutamine metabolism is more regulatory than producing, since the liver takes up large amounts of glutamine derived from the gut. [7]
"Glutamine-to-glutamate ratio in the nucleus accumbens predicts effort-based motivated performance in humans" (2020) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0760-6
> High glutamine-to-glutamate ratio predicts the ability to sustain motivation: The researchers found that individuals with a higher glutamine-to-glutamate ratio had a higher success rate and a lower perception of effort. https://neuroscienceschool.com/2020/10/11/how-to-sustain-mot...
ICYMI: You may appreciate this video...
Is cancer all about cellular energy from oxygen?
/? lactic acid atp: https://www.google.com/search?q=lactic+acid+atp
- "What is lactic acid?" https://www.livescience.com/what-is-lactic-acid
> Although blood lactate concentration does increase during intense exercise, the lactic acid molecule itself dissociates and the lactate is recycled and used to create more ATP.
> "Your body naturally metabolizes the lactic acid, clearing it out. The liver can take up some of the lactic acid molecules and convert them back to glucose for fuel," says Grover. "This conversion also reduces the acidity in the blood, thus removing some of the burning sensation. This is a natural process that occurs in the body. Things such as stretching, rolling, or walking will have little to no impact."
> The burning sensation you feel in your legs during a heavy workout probably isn't caused by lactic acid, but instead by tissue damage and inflammation.
> It’s also important to remember that lactate itself isn’t 'bad'. In fact, research in [Bioscience Horizons] suggests that lactate is beneficial to the body during and after exercise in numerous ways. For example, lactate can be used directly by the brain and heart for energy or converted into glucose in the liver or kidneys, which can then be used by nearly any cell in the body for energy.
- https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/University_of_Kentucky/U... :
> Lactic Acid Fermentation: You may have not been aware that your muscle cells can ferment. Fermentation is the process of producing ATP in the absence of oxygen, through glycolysis alone. Recall that glycolysis breaks a glucose molecule into two pyruvate molecules, producing a net gain of two ATP and two NADH molecules. Lactic acid fermentation is the type of anaerobic respiration carried out by yogurt bacteria (Lactobacillus and others) and by your own muscle cells when you work them hard and fast.
Is that relevant to cancer and oxygen, IDK.
Hopefully NIRS + ultrasound ("HIFU" & modern waveguides) can inexpensively treat many more forms of cancer.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35812168 :
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617859 ... "A simple technique to overcome self-focusing, filamentation, supercontinuum generation, aberrations, depth dependence and waveguide interface roughness using fs laser processing" [w/ Dual Beams]
See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS
https://github.com/jawj/subtls (A proof-of-concept TypeScript TLS 1.3 client) is implemented with the SubtleCrypto API.
TIL about SubtleCrypto https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypt... :
> The SubtleCrypto interface of the Web Crypto API provides a number of low-level cryptographic functions. Access to the features of SubtleCrypto is obtained through the subtle property of the Crypto object you get from the crypto property.
decrypt()
deriveBits()
deriveKey()
digest()
encrypt()
exportKey()
generateKey()
importKey()
sign()
unwrapKey()
verify()
wrapkey()
> ISSUE: Avoid signature format proliferation by using text-based suite value The pattern that Data Integrity Signatures use presently leads to a proliferation in signature types and JSON-LD Contexts. This proliferation can be avoided without any loss of the security characteristics of tightly binding a cryptography suite version to one or more acceptable public keys. The following signature suites are currently being contemplated: eddsa-2022, nist-ecdsa-2022, koblitz-ecdsa-2022, rsa-2022, pgp-2022, bbs-2022, eascdsa-2022, ibsa-2022, and jws-2022.
But what about "Kyber, NTRU, {FIPS-140-3}? [TLS1.4/2.0?]" i.e. PQ Post-Quantum signature suites? Why don't those need to be URIs, too?
Loophole-free Bell inequality violation with superconducting circuits
"Loophole-free Bell test ‘Spooky action at a distance’, no cheating (tudelft.nl)" (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10430675
/? ./hnlog: "nonlocal", "unitarity":
From "The fundamental thermodynamic costs of communication" (2023) https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-34765393 :
> Isn't there more entropy if we consider all possible nonlocal relations between bits; or, is which entropy metric independent of redundant coding schemes between points in spacetime?
From "New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34809725 :
> Is there an information metric which expresses maximal nonlocal connectivity between bits in a bitstring; that takes all possible (nonlocal, discontiguous) paths into account?
> `n_nodes2` only describes all of the binary, pairwise possible relations between the bits or qubits in a bitstring?*
> "But what is a convolution" https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/convolutions
> Quantum discord: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord
From "Formal methods only solve half my problems" (2022) https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31625499 :
> It might be argued that side channels exist whenever there is a shared channel; which is always, because plenoptic functions, wave function, air gap, ram bus mhz, nonlocal entanglement
> Category:Side-channel attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Side-channel_attacks
/? ./hnlog: "entanglement" ... Quantum FlyTrap
Show HN: Mineo.app – Better Python Notebooks
Hello everyone,
I would like to introduce our startup to HN: Mineo.app. Mineo.app is a production-ready SaaS Python notebook that provides a complete environment for building your data applications: Dashboards, Reports, and Data Pipelines based on Python notebooks.
Key features:
* Superpowered jupyter-compatible Python notebooks with extra goodies like: version control, commenting support, custom docker images, etc... enhanced with no code components that allow to create beautiful dashboards and reports.
* Data Pipelines: Ability to schedule and run one or more notebooks.
* Integrated file system to manage your files and projects with detailed permissions and groups.
We have a freemium licensing model, so you can start using Mineo just by registering with your Github/Google/Microsoft account for free without a credit card. And it's free for educational purposes ;-)
Diego.
I think it was a little too early share but since you asked...
Crafting workflows out of notebooks is a really bad idea; an anti-pattern. If you want to go down the road of "workflows for data scientists" look at https://featurebyte.com/
Your messaging indicates you also want to appeal to business intelligence users, with their data exploration needs. In this space I give the crown to https://hex.tech/ How are you going to be different or better?
Also, you should fix your showcase so prospective users don't have to log in. I'll just nope out of your site.
Have you considered going open core? That would make me look more favorably at your product given your lack of indisputable product- and technical superiority.
And last but not least, I wish you success!
> Crafting workflows out of notebooks is a really bad idea; an anti-pattern. If you want to go down the road of "workflows for data scientists"
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Ctrl-F "DVC" ( https://dvc.org/ ) , https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24261118 "Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research", “Ten Simple Rules for Creating a Good Data Management Plan”, PROV
pygwalker https://github.com/Kanaries/pygwalker :
> PyGWalker: Turn your pandas dataframe into a Tableau-style User Interface for visual analysis
"Generate code from GUI interactions; State restoration & Undo" https://github.com/Kanaries/pygwalker/issues/90
The Scientific Method is testing, so testing (tests, assertions, fixtures) should be core to any scientific workflow system.
- [ ] (It's not possible to run `!pytest` in a Jupyter notebook without installing an extension with JupyterLite in WASM onnly where there's not yet a terminal or even yet a slow-but-usable [cheerpx] webvm bridged to jupyter kernel WASM ~process-space.)
awesome-jupyter#testing: https://github.com/markusschanta/awesome-jupyter#testing
ml-tooling/best-of-jupyter lists papermill/papermill under "Interactive Widgets/Visualization" https://github.com/ml-tooling/best-of-jupyter#interactive-wi...
"Markdown based notebooks" would store files next to the .ipynb.md, which implies a need for an MHTML/ZIP-like archive (for report notebook artifacts produced by scientific workflow systems with provenance metadata); but W3C Web Bundles avoid modifying linked resources with new specs: https://github.com/jupyter/enhancement-proposals/pull/103#is...
Google will label fake images created with its A.I
> Google’s approach is to label the images when they come out of the AI system, instead of trying to determine whether they’re real later on. Google said Shutterstock and Midjourney would support this new markup approach. Google developer documentation says the markup will be able to categorize images as trained algorithmic media, which was made by an AI model; a composite image that was partially made with an AI model; or algorithmic media, which was created by a computer but isn’t based on training data.
Can it store at least: (1) the prompt; and (2) the model which purportedly were generated by a Turing robot with said markup specification? Is it schema.org JSON-LD?
It's IPTC: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
If IPTC-to-RDF i.e./e.g. schema:ImageObject (schema:CreativeWork > https://schema.org/ImageObject) mappings are complete, it would be possible to sign IPTC metadata with W3C Verifiable Credentials (and e.g. W3C DIDs) just like any other [JSON-LD,] RDF; but is there an IPTC schema extension for appending signatures, and/or is there an IPTC graph normalization step that generates equivalent output to a (web-standardized) JSON-LD normalization function?
/? IPTC jsonschema: https://github.com/ihsn/nada/blob/master/api-documentation/s...
/? IPTC schema.org RDFS
IPTC extension schema: https://exiv2.org/tags-xmp-iptcExt.html
[ Examples of input parameters & hyperparameters: from e.g. the screenshot in the README.md of stablediffusion-webui or text-generation-webui: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui ]
How should input parameters and e.g. LLM model version & signed checksum and model hyperparameters be stored next to a generated CreativeWork? filename.png.meta.jsonld.json or similar?
If an LLM passes the Turing test ("The Imitation Game") - i.e. has output indistinguishable from a human's output - does that imply that it is not possible to stylometrically fingerprint its outputs without intentional watermarking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
Implicit in the Turing test is the entity doing the evaluation. It's quite possible that a human evaluator could be tricked, but a tool-assisted human, or an AI itself could not be. Or even just some humans could be better at not being tricked than others.
Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”
I started to add an ai.txt to my projects. The file is just a basic text file with some useful info about the website like what it is about, when was it published, the author, etc etc.
It can be great if the website somehow ends up in a training dataset (who knows), and it can be super helpful for AI website crawlers, instead of using thousands of tokens to know what your website is about, they can do it with just a few hundred.
Your HTML already has semantic meta elements like author and description you should be populating with info like that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Introduc...
and also opengraph meta tags https://ogp.me/
And also schema.org: https://schema.org/
Thing > CreativeWork > WebSite https://schema.org/WebSite ... scroll down to "Examples" and click the "JSON-LD" and/or "RDFa" tabs. (And if there isn't an example then go to the schema.org/ URL of a superClassOf (rdfs:subClassOf) of the rdfs:Class or rdfs:Property; there are many markup examples for CreativeWork and subtypes).
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35891631
extruct is one way to parse linked data from HTML pages: https://github.com/scrapinghub/extruct
security.txt https://github.com/securitytxt/security-txt :
> security.txt provides a way for websites to define security policies. The security.txt file sets clear guidelines for security researchers on how to report security issues. security.txt is the equivalent of robots.txt, but for security issues.
Carbon.txt: https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/carbon.txt :
> A proposed convention for website owners and digital service providers to demonstrate that their digital infrastructure runs on green electricity.
"Work out how to make it discoverable - well-known, TXT records or root domains" https://github.com/thegreenwebfoundation/carbon.txt/issues/3... re: JSON-LD instead of txt, signed records with W3C Verifiable Credentials (and blockcerts/cert-verifier-js)
SPDX is a standard for specifying software licenses (and now SBOMs Software Bill of Materials, too) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Package_Data_Exchange
It would be transparent to disclose the SBOM in AI.txt or elsewhere.
How many parsers should be necessary for https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/license metadata for resources with (Linked Data) URIs?
Having a security.txt doesn't stop security researchers asking "Do you have a bounty program?". We replied dozens already that such a file exist, it's not well enough known yet. On the other hand there are search engines crawling those and creating reports, which is nice.
JSON-LD or RDFa (RDF in HTML attributes) in at least the /index.html the HTML footer should be sufficient to indicate that there is structured linked data metadata for crawlers that then don't need an HTTP request to a .well-known URL /.well-known/ai_security_reproducibility_carbon.txt.jsonld.json
OSV is a new format for reporting security vulnerabilities like CVEs and an HTTP API for looking up CVEs from software component name and version. https://github.com/ossf/osv-schema
A number of tools integrate with OSV-schema data hosted by osv.dev: https://github.com/google/osv.dev#third-party-tools-and-inte... :
> We provide a Go based tool that will scan your dependencies, and check them against the OSV database for known vulnerabilities via the OSV API.
> Currently it is able to scan various lockfiles [ repo2docker REES config files like and requirements.txt, Pipfile lock, environment.yml, or a custom Dockerfile, ], debian docker containers, SPDX and CycloneDB SBOMs, and git repositories.
Language models can explain neurons in language models
LLMs are quickly going to be able to start explaining their own thought processes better than any human can explain their own. I wonder how many new words we will come up with to describe concepts (or "node-activating clusters of meaning") that the AI finds salient that we don't yet have a singular word for. Or, for that matter, how many of those concepts we will find meaningful at all. What will this teach us about ourselves?
First of all, our own explanations about ourselves and our behaviour are mostly lies, fabrications, hallucinations, faulty re-memorization, post hoc reasoning:
"In one well-known experiment, a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere was shown a picture of a chicken claw and his right hemisphere was shown a picture of a snow scene. The patient was asked to point to a card that was associated with the picture he just saw. With his left hand (controlled by his right hemisphere) he selected a shovel, which matched the snow scene. With his right hand (controlled by his left hemisphere) he selected a chicken, which matched the chicken claw. Next, the experimenter asked the patient why he selected each item. One would expect the speaking left hemisphere to explain why it chose the chicken but not why it chose the shovel, since the left hemisphere did not have access to information about the snow scene. Instead, the patient’s speaking left hemisphere replied, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed”" [1]. Also [2] has an interesting hypothesis on split-brains: not two agents, but two streams of perception.
[1] 2014, "Divergent hemispheric reasoning strategies: reducing uncertainty versus resolving inconsistency", https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204522
[2] 2017, "The Split-Brain phenomenon revisited: A single conscious agent with split perception", https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/25987577/Split_Brain.pdf
Not supported by neuroimaging. Promoted without evidence or sufficient causal inference.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-ri... :
> But, the evidence discounting the left/right brain concept is accumulating. According to a 2013 study from the University of Utah, brain scans demonstrate that activity is similar on both sides of the brain regardless of one's personality.
> They looked at the brain scans of more than 1,000 young people between the ages of 7 and 29 and divided different areas of the brain into 7,000 regions to determine whether one side of the brain was more active or connected than the other side. No evidence of "sidedness" was found. The authors concluded that the notion of some people being more left-brained or right-brained is more a figure of speech than an anatomically accurate description.
Here's wikipedia on the topic: "Lateralization of brain function" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi...
Furthermore, "Neuropsychoanalysis" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychoanalysis
Neuropsychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology
Personality psychology > ~Biophysiological: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology
MBTI > Criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
Connectome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome
This is not relevant to GP's comment. It has nothing to do with "are there fixed 'themes' that are operated in each hemisphere." It has to do with more generally, does the brain know what the brain is doing. The answer so far does not seem to be "yes."
Says who? There is actual evidence to support that our brain doesn't "know" what it is doing on a subconscious level? As far as I'm aware it's more that conscious humans don't understand how our brain works.
I think the correct statement is "so far the answer is we don't know"
The split brain experiments very very clearly indicate that different parts of the brain can independently conduct behavior and gain knowledge independently of other parts.
How or if this generalizes to healthy brains is not super clear, but it does actually provide a good explanatory model for all sorts of self-contradictory behavior (like addiction): the brain has many semi-independent “interests” that are jockeying for overall control of the organism’s behavior. These interests can be fully contradictory to each other.
Correct, ultimately we do not know. But it’s actually a different question than your rephrasing.
Given that functional localization varies widely from subject to subject per modern neuroimaging, how are split brain experiments more than crude attempts to confirm functional specialization (which is already confirmed without traumatically severing a corpus callosum) "hemispheric" or "lateral"?
Neuroimaging indicates high levels of redundancy and variance in spatiotemporal activation.
Studies of cortices and other tissues have already shown that much of the neural tissue of the brain is general purpose.
Why is executive functioning significantly but not exclusively in the tissue of the forebrain, the frontal lobes?
Because there’s a version of specialization that is, “different regions are specialized but they all seem to build consensus” and there’s a version that is “different regions are specialized and consensus does not seem to be necessary or potentially even usual or possible.”
These offer very different interpretations of cognition and behavior, and the split brain experiments point toward the latter.
Functional specialization > Major theories of the brain> Modularity or/and Distributive processing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_specialization_(bra... :
> Modularity: [...] The difficulty with this theory is that in typical non-lesioned subjects, locations within the brain anatomy are similar but not completely identical. There is a strong defense for this inherent deficit in our ability to generalize when using functional localizing techniques (fMRI, PET etc.). To account for this problem, the coordinate-based Talairach and Tournoux stereotaxic system is widely used to compare subjects' results to a standard brain using an algorithm. Another solution using coordinates involves comparing brains using sulcal reference points. A slightly newer technique is to use functional landmarks, which combines sulcal and gyral landmarks (the groves and folds of the cortex) and then finding an area well known for its modularity such as the fusiform face area. This landmark area then serves to orient the researcher to the neighboring cortex. [7]
Is there a way to address the brain with space-filling curves around ~loci/landmarks? For brain2brain etc
FWIU, Markham's lab found that the brain is at max 11D in some places; But an electron wave model (in the time domain) may or must be sufficient according to psychoenergetics (Bearden)
> Distributive processing: [...] McIntosh's research suggests that human cognition involves interactions between the brain regions responsible for processes sensory information, such as vision, audition, and other mediating areas like the prefrontal cortex. McIntosh explains that modularity is mainly observed in sensory and motor systems, however, beyond these very receptors, modularity becomes "fuzzier" and you see the cross connections between systems increase.[33] He also illustrates that there is an overlapping of functional characteristics between the sensory and motor systems, where these regions are close to one another. These different neural interactions influence each other, where activity changes in one area influence other connected areas. With this, McIntosh suggest that if you only focus on activity in one area, you may miss the changes in other integrative areas.[33] Neural interactions can be measured using analysis of covariance in neuroimaging [...]
FWIU electrons are most appropriately modeled with Minkowski 4-space in the time-domain; (L^3)t
Neuroplasticity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity :
> The adult brain is not entirely "hard-wired" with fixed neuronal circuits. There are many instances of cortical and subcortical rewiring of neuronal circuits in response to training as well as in response to injury.
> There is ample evidence [53] for the active, experience-dependent re-organization of the synaptic networks of the brain involving multiple inter-related structures including the cerebral cortex.[54] The specific details of how this process occurs at the molecular and ultrastructural levels are topics of active neuroscience research. The way experience can influence the synaptic organization of the brain is also the basis for a number of theories of brain function
"Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882... :
> Recent work has revealed that the neural activity patterns correlated with sensation, cognition, and action often are not stable and instead undergo large scale changes over days and weeks—a phenomenon called representational drift. Here, we highlight recent observations of drift, how drift is unlikely to be explained by experimental confounds, and how the brain can likely compensate for drift to allow stable computation. We propose that drift might have important roles in neural computation to allow continual learning, both for separating and relating memories that occur at distinct times. Finally, we present an outlook on future experimental directions that are needed to further characterize drift and to test emerging theories for drift's role in computation.
So, to run the same [fMRI, NIRS,] stimulus response activation observation/burn-in again weeks or months later with the same subjects is likely necessary given Representational drift.
IPyflow: Reactive Python Notebooks in Jupyter(Lab)
That’s a pretty nice idea. The problem of knowing what state has been invalidated often drives me away from using a notebook. So it is nice to see this solved.
I often though we would benefit from having some kind of shell, only a mix between ipython qtconsole et jupyter.
Not an editor like jupyter, rather a shell with a REPL flow. But each prompt is like a jupyter cell, and the whole history is saved in a file.
But if you don't create a file, it should work as well. One of the annoying things about jupyter is that you can use it without file on disk unlike ipython shell.
jupyter_console is the IPython REPL for non-ipykernel jupyter kernels.
This magic command logs IPython REPL input and output to a file:
%logstart -o example.log.pyMachine Learning Containers Are Bloated and Vulnerable
https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ :
> jupyter-repo2docker is a tool to build, run, and push Docker images from source code repositories.
> repo2docker fetches a repository (from GitHub, GitLab, Zenodo, Figshare, Dataverse installations, a Git repository or a local directory) and builds a container image in which the code can be executed. The image build process is based on the configuration files found in the repository.
> repo2docker can be used to explore a repository locally by building and executing the constructed image of the repository, or as a means of building images that are pushed to a Docker registry.
> repo2docker is the tool used by BinderHub to build images on demand
There are maintenance advantages and longer time to patch with kitchen-sink ML containers like kaggle/docker-python because it takes work to entirely bump all of the versions in the requirements specification files (and run integration tests to make sure code still runs after upgrading everything or one thing at a time).
What's best practice for including a sizeable dataset in a container (that's been recently re-) built with repo2docker?
Health advisory on social media use in adolescence
This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health:
Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health: preliminary results from a panel network analysis https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
> There is growing concern about the role of social media use in the documented increase of adolescent mental health difficulties. However, the current evidence remains complex and inconclusive. While increasing research on this area of work has allowed for notable progress, the impact of social media use within the complex systems of adolescent mental health and development is yet to be examined. The current study addresses this conceptual and methodological oversight by applying a panel network analysis to explore the role of social media on key interacting systems of mental health, wellbeing and social life of 12,041 UK adolescents. Here we find that, across time, estimated time spent interacting with social media predicts concentration problems in female participants. However, of the factors included in the current network, social media use is one of the least influential factors of adolescent mental health, with others (for example, bullying, lack of family support and school work dissatisfaction) exhibiting stronger associations. Our findings provide an important exploratory first step in mapping out complex relationships between social media use and key developmental systems and highlight the need for social policy initiatives that focus on the home and school environment to foster resilience.
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
But it's the one that's easy to assign blame to: it's the evil (sometimes foreign) big tech companies fault.
Increasingly poor economics prospects, environmental crisis and over-competitive society are much tougher issues to crack, and perhaps, in the case of housing for instance, certain demographics would prefer to blame the "evil screens" rather than their own generation's behavior over the years...
although I believe the big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs, it is a good question to ask why people are in a position to spend so much time on social media and are doing so in place of other activities. For example, the lack of public spaces where one can spend time without spending money, relatively recent parenting practices and legal obstacles to having unsupervised time outdoors, etc.
I can see it in myself and I suspect others feel similarly. And I suspect kids feel it even more strongly but that's just an assumption of mine. The way "big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs" is by designing their apps such that it's physically addicting. Once you're addicted it's hard to do the other things you mentioned because they don't release the same chemicals in your brain.
Would it be abusive or advisable to adapt edtech offerings in light of social media and slot machines' UX user experience findings?
While they should never appease students, can't infotech and edtech learn how to keep their attention, too?
Perhaps prompt engineering can help to create engaging educational content with substantive progress metrics?
"Build a game in JS (like game category XYZ) to teach quantum entropy to beginners"
And then what prompt additions could help to social media-ify the game?
How should social media reinforce human communication behaviors with or without the stated age of the user? Should there be a "D- because that's harassment" panda video to reinforce? Which presidential role models' communication styles should AI emulate?
I find it sad to consider that the most impactful thing to do to improve children's lives would be to ban them from social media due to their age; though, for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution.
Hopefully, Khanmigo and similar AI edtech offerings will be more engaging than preferentially reviewing unacceptable abuse online; but kids and people still need to learn to interact respectfully online in order to succeed.
Reactivating Dormant Cells in the Retina Brings New Hope for Vision Regeneration
"Direct neuronal reprogramming by temporal identity factors" (2023) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122168120#abstract :
> Abstract: Temporal identity factors are sufficient to reprogram developmental competence of neural progenitors and shift cell fate output, but whether they can also reprogram the identity of terminally differentiated cells is unknown. To address this question, we designed a conditional gene expression system that allows rapid screening of potential reprogramming factors in mouse retinal glial cells combined with genetic lineage tracing. Using this assay, we found that coexpression of the early temporal identity transcription factors Ikzf1 and Ikzf4 is sufficient to directly convert Müller glial (MG) cells into cells that translocate to the outer nuclear layer (ONL), where photoreceptor cells normally reside. We name these “induced ONL (iONL)” cells. Using genetic lineage tracing, histological, immunohistochemical, and single-cell transcriptome and multiome analyses, we show that expression of Ikzf1/4 in MG in vivo, without retinal injury, mostly generates iONL cells that share molecular characteristics with bipolar cells, although a fraction of them stain for Rxrg, a cone photoreceptor marker. Furthermore, we show that coexpression of Ikzf1 and Ikzf4 can reprogram mouse embryonic fibroblasts to induced neurons in culture by rapidly remodeling chromatin and activating a neuronal gene expression program. This work uncovers general neuronal reprogramming properties for temporal identity factors in terminally differentiated cells.
Is it possible to produce or convert Müller glial cells with Nanotransfection (stroma reprogramming), too?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127646 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-33129531 re: "Retinoid restores eye-specific brain responses in mice with retinal degeneration" (2022) :
> Null hypothesis: A Nanotransfection (vasculogenic stromal reprogramming) intervention would not result in significant retinal or corneal regrowth
> ... With or without: a nerve growth factor, e.g. fluoxetine to induce plasticity in the adult visual cortex, combination therapy with cultured conjunctival IPS, laser mechanical scar tissue evisceration and removal, local anesthesia, robotic support, Retinoid
> Nanotransfection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection :
>> Most reprogramming methods have a heavy reliance on viral transfection. [22][23] TNT allows for implementation of a non-viral approach which is able to overcome issues of capsid size, increase safety, and increase deterministic reprogramming
Ask HN: Did anyone ever create GitLaw?
A thread from 11 years ago[0] proposed a "A GitHub for Laws and Legal Documents". Did anyone ever develop something similar to this? Even without the ability to propose changes, being able to view a git history of passed bills would be useful for anyone who would want to analyze the changes over time.
If a tool has been built, please share it. If not, what are the major blockers to at least building the history / diff tool?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3967921
Various localities upload their statutes to a git repository hosted as a GitHub project; but I'm not aware of any using Pull Request (PR) workflows to propose or debate legislative bills (or to enter or link to case law precedent for review).
The US Library of Congress operates the THOMAS system for legislative bills. How could THOMAS be improved; in order to support evidence-based policy; in order to improve democracy in democratic republics like the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THOMAS
How do state systems for legislative bills document workflows and beyond compare to THOMAS, the US federal Congress system? Why do we need 50+1 independent [open source?] software applications; could states work together on such essential systems?
IIRC, LOC invested in improving THOMAS with: markup language to typographically-readable HTML support?
It may be helpful to send an email to your state with the regex regular expression pattern necessary to make online statute section and subsection references a href links instead of non-clickable string. TIL the section sign ("§") is older than the hyperlink; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_sign
Parliamentary informatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_informatics
FWIU, diffing documents is a solved problem.
How could pull request workflows be improved in order to support legislative and post-legislative workflows (like controlling for whether a funded plan actually has the proscribed impact)?
High School and College Policy debate (CX; Cross Examination debate) enjoy equal rights to 'fiat'. IRL, we must control for whether the plan and funding have the predicted impact.
E.g. GitHub and GitLab have various features that could support legislative workflows: code owners, multiple approvals required to merge, emoji reactions on Issues and Pull Requests and comments therein such that you don't have to say why you voted a particular way, GPG-signatures required for commit and merge, 2FA.
FWIU, the Aragorn / district0x projects have some of the first DLT-based (Blockchain) systems for democracy; all of the rest of us trust one party to share root access and multi-site backup responsibilities and have insufficient DDOS protections.
There was a discussion on HN where the real blocker is everyone uses Microsoft Word, and all the related tools on it, and no one was going to change their workflow.
Any such legislative solution may involve meeting the users where they are, first. Understanding the whole lifecycle, so to speak.
Show HN: ReRender AI - Realistic Architectural Renders for AutoCAD/Blender Users
Different but the same problem: "Generate a heat sink heat exchanger with maximum efficiency, shaped like a passive solar home"
TIL from off-gridders and homesteaders about passive solar design so that the air moves through the home without HVAC (compared with high rise buildings where it is necessary to pump water up like a gravitational potential water tower.)
Does ReRender AI have features for sustainable architecture?
Prompt: "Design a passive solar high-rise building with maximal energy storage and production"
Notes from "Zero energy ready homes are coming" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064493
ReRender AI focuses on rendering, not sustainable design features. Architects must incorporate sustainability themselves. However, the AI can visually represent a passive solar high-rise if provided with the necessary design elements.
Exciton Fission Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Photovoltaic Solar Cells
> Researchers have resolved the mechanism of exciton fission, which could increase solar-to-electricity efficiency by one-third, potentially revolutionizing photovoltaic technology.
“Orbital-resolved observation of singlet fission” by Alexander Neef, Samuel Beaulieu, Sebastian Hammer, Shuo Dong, Julian Maklar, Tommaso Pincelli, R. Patrick Xian, Martin Wolf, Laurenz Rettig, Jens Pflaum and Ralph Ernstorfer, 12 April 2023, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05814-1 : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05814-1 :
> Abstract: Singlet fission may boost photovoltaic efficiency by transforming a singlet exciton into two triplet excitons and thereby doubling the number of excited charge carriers. The primary step of singlet fission is the ultrafast creation of the correlated triplet pair. Whereas several mechanisms have been proposed to explain this step, none has emerged as a consensus. The challenge lies in tracking the transient excitonic states. Here we use time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to observe the primary step of singlet fission in crystalline pentacene. Our results indicate a charge-transfer mediated mechanism with a hybridization of Frenkel and charge-transfer states in the lowest bright singlet exciton. We gained intimate knowledge about the localization and the orbital character of the exciton wave functions recorded in momentum maps. This allowed us to directly compare the localization of singlet and bitriplet excitons and decompose energetically overlapping states on the basis of their orbital character. Orbital- and localization-resolved many-body dynamics promise deep insights into the mechanics governing molecular systems and topological materials
Energy conversion efficiency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency
Multiple exciton generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_exciton_generation
Latex users are slower than Word users and make more errors (2014)
And neither typesetting activity results in reusable LinkedData; because it's still not possible to publish Linked Data (or indeed data and its schema) with LaTeX, or Word, or PDF.
ScholarlyArticles' most relevant purpose is to link to the schema:Dataset that the presented analysis is predicated upon.
ScholarlyArticle authors should consider the value of data reuse and (linked data) schema in choosing a typesetting and publishing format.
Is there a better way to publish Linked Data with existing tools like LaTeX, PDF, or Word? Which support CSVW? Which support RDF/RDFa/JSON-LD?
How could authors express experimental study controls with URIs; with qualified typed edges to the data (and a cryptographic signature from an IRB and the ScholarlyArticle's authors).
> Is there a better way to publish Linked Data with existing tools like LaTeX, PDF, or Word? Which support CSVW? Which support RDF/RDFa/JSON-LD?
- [ ] ~"How to publish Linked Data with Jupyter notebooks" #todo #LinkedReproducibility #LinkedResearch
- [ ] westurner/nbmeta, jupyter*/?: Linked Data result object for notebooks; with a _repr_mimebundle_() and application/ld+json
- [ ] python 3.x+ grammar: de-restrict use of the walrus assignment operator := so that users can assign to the LD dict result object and implicitly IPython.display.display() it because walrus assignment returns the object assigned (whereas normal = assignment does not return a value)
- [ ] westurner/nbmeta?, JLab, jupyter-book: JSON-LD Playground widget to display and reframe JSON-LD (& maybe YAML-LD, too)
- [ ] jupyterlab: schema.org notebook level bibliographic schema.org/CreativeWork metadata
- [ ] jupyterlab: JS/TypeScript: JSON-LD/YAML-LD editor widget also built on codemirror like JLab or a different existing RDFJS library or?
- [ ] rdflib, jupyter nb, sphinx, pygments: add YAML-LD syntax support (now that there's a W3C spec)
- [ ] MyST markdown, sphinx, docutils: YAML-LD in MyST [in: code-fence attr syntax,] in order to add Linked Data to MyST Markdown documents and thus Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyter Books
- [ ] hypothesis/h, sphinx-comments: Linked Data Annotations (within nested Markdown, like hypothesis' W3C Web Annotations support); cc re: 'MyST-LD' Markdown: quoting "@id", "@context" in YAML-LD
- [ ] atomspace-like TrustValues with RDFstar/SPARQLstar (in YAML-LD because that implies JSON-LD)
- [ ] dvc, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Gitea Actions,: how to add PROV RDF Linked Data metadata to workflows like DVC.org's & container+command-in-YAML approach
- [ ] Microsoft/excel, Microsoft/VSCode: How to CSVW and PROV with spreadsheets and or code ; see also Excel speed-running competitons
- [ ] REQ: jupyter/rtc+linkeddata/dokieli: howto integrate Jupyter notebooks with the list of specs in the dokieli README
- [ ] njupyter/nbformat#?: a post- .ipynb notebook + resources spec? W3C Web Bundles have advantages including: you don't have to rewrite URLs in content saved offline like MHTML (mv $1.mhtml $1.mhtml.zip)
- [ ] JupyterLab, VSCode: CoCalc - which supports Time Travel version control over notebooks, LaTeX docs, - added a TODO: ~not_editable code cell metadata item; which is more like lab notebooks in pen; but there's not GUI support in JLab or other Jupyter notebook nbformat implementations yet
- [ ] Jupyter/nbformat, ipywidgets, jupyterlab,: How to save widget state: https://github.com/jupyter-widgets/ipywidgets/issues/2465
> How could authors express experimental study controls with URIs; with qualified typed edges to the data (and a cryptographic signature from an IRB and the ScholarlyArticle's authors).
Verifiable Credentials Data Model v1.1: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0: Securing the Integrity of Verifiable Credential Data: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-integrity/ :
> Abstract: This specification describes mechanisms for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of Verifiable Credentials and similar types of constrained digital documents using cryptography, especially through the use of digital signatures and related mathematical proofs.
Because data quality, data reuse, code reuse, web standard specifications, structured data outputs with provenance metadata for partially-automated metaanalyses,; https://5stardata.info/
The skills gap for Fortran looms large in HPC
> The good news for some HPC simulations and models, both inside of the National Nuclear Security Administration program at the DOE and in the HPC community at large, is that many large-scale physics codes have been rewritten or coded from scratch in C++
When C++ one day goes out of fashion, like Fortran already has, this will turn out to be bad news. Fortran is not a big language, and any programmer can learn Fortran in a matter of weeks. But if you'd need to teach people C++ just so that they'd be able to maintain a legacy code base, that will be considerably more difficult than with Fortran.
Probably in a thousand years nobody will be writing C++. In one year, there will still be a helluva lot of C++, including new projects.
Point being, the premise of your argument isn't granted. Is C++ going away soon? Or is it holding steady and even growing? How can someone objectively know either way?
> Is C++ going away soon? Or is it holding steady and even growing? How can someone objectively know either way?
No. It's not going away anytime soon, but you can look at high-performance languages that are gaining in popularity, and that may point to change in the future. TIOBE isn't perfect, but it's a good indicator of interest, and Rust and Go seem to continue to gain popularity.
Interestingly, and related to this article, Fortran has moved up from #31 to #20 on TIOBE's index, which really does speak to the importance of a math-optimized, high performance, compiled language. Another interesting change is MATLAB moving up from #20 to #14.
TIOBE index is rivaled by the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey in some regards https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula... :
> Most popular technologies This year, we're comparing the popular technologies across three different groups: All respondents, Professional Developers, and those that are learning to code.
Most popular technologies > Programming, scripting, and markup languages
The Top 500 Green500 (and the TechEmpower Web Framework benchmarks) are also great resources for estimating what people did this past year; what are the "BigE" of our models in terms of water, kwh of [directly or PPA-offset] sourced clean energy.
The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
Ctrl-F "rust"
https://rust-for-linux.com/ links to LWN articles at https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Development_tools-Rust that suggest that only basic modules are yet possible with the rust support in Linux kernels 6.2 and 6.3.
Rust-for-linux links to the Android binder module though: https://rust-for-linux.com/Android-Binder-Driver.html :
> Android Binder Driver: This project is an effort to rewrite Android's Binder kernel driver in Rust.
> Motivation: Binder is one of the most security and performance critical components of Android. Android isolates apps from each other and the system by assigning each app a unique user ID (UID). This is called "application sandboxing", and is a fundamental tenet of the Android Platform Security Model.
> The majority of inter-process communication (IPC) on Android goes through Binder. Thus, memory unsafety vulnerabilities are especially critical when they happen in the Binder driver
... "Rust in the Linux kernel" (2021) https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-linux-kernel... :
> [...] We also need designs that allow code in the two languages to interact with each other: we're particularly interested in safe, zero-cost abstractions that allow Rust code to use kernel functionality written in C, and how to implement functionality in idiomatic Rust that can be called seamlessly from the C portions of the kernel.
> Since Rust is a new language for the kernel, we also have the opportunity to enforce best practices in terms of documentation and uniformity. For example, we have specific machine-checked requirements around the usage of unsafe code: for every unsafe function, the developer must document the requirements that need to be satisfied by callers to ensure that its usage is safe; additionally, for every call to unsafe functions (or usage of unsafe constructs like dereferencing a raw pointer), the developer must document the justification for why it is safe to do so.
> We'll now show how such a driver would be implemented in Rust, contrasting it with a C implementation. [...]
Is this the source for the rust port of the Android binder kernel module?: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/...
This guide with unsafe rust that calls into the C, and then with next gen much safer rust right next to it would be a helpful resource too.
What of the post-docker container support (with userspaces also written in go) should be cloned to rust first?
What are some good examples of non-trivial Linux kernel modules written in Rust?
On Android the Linux kernel is its own thing, and after Project Treble, it follows a microkernel like approach to drivers, where standard Linux drivers are considered "legacy" since Android 8.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/hal
Don't use how Linux kernel does things on Android as understanding from how upstream works.
In your opinion, do you think that the microkernel approach is more secure? (Should processes run as separate users with separate SELinux contexts like Android 4.4+)
Why do you think that the Android binder module rust implementation is listed as an example of a Rust for Linux kernel module on the site?
"Android AOSP Can Boot Off Mainline Linux 5.9 With Just One Patch" (2020) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Android-AOSP-Close-Linux-5.9 :
> The Android open-source project "AOSP" with its latest code is very close to being able to boot off the mainline Linux kernel when assuming the device drivers are all upstream.
Other distros support kmods and akmods: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/ijfbgl/comm... :
> How kmod / akmod // DKMS work is something that the community is maybe not real familiar with.
Of course microkernel approach is more secure, if a driver gets p0wned, corrupts data structures, or plain keeps crashing, it doesn't take the whole kernel with it.
Naturally the issue might be as bad that the whole stack can't recover from, but still much better than corrupting the kernel.
One of the SecDevOps guidelines when hardening servers is that every process should have its own user, yes.
Kmods and akmods run in kernel memory space and aren't ABI stable.
Binder is not a HAL, since binder is how HALs communicate with each other. It's an actual proper Linux driver. The C version is in the upstream kernel as a module you can enable when building the kernel.
Waydroid (Android in containers) requires binder and optionally ashmem, though ashmem is not required anymore because memfd works with vanilla kernel: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid#Kernel_Modules
There is a Google Play Certification process for waydroid devices: https://docs.waydro.id/faq/google-play-certification
(That manual provisioning step is not necessary for e.g. optional widevine DRM on other OSes)
xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition
On one hand this effort sounds like a good way to generate some interesting concepts. On the other hand, as a long-time resident of a rural, wildfire-prone area, it's also important to educate the public and politicians that there is a large body of proven land management best practices that can already significantly improve prevention, control and mitigation. While we can always do better, we often aren't sufficiently utilizing the tools and techniques we already have.
The issues are more often political, economic and systemic than they are not knowing effective ways to further reduce risks and harm. Things like properly managed controlled burns are under-utilized because they are politically controversial. Enacting and enforcing codes mandating land management around private structures are politically unpopular. Out where I live, the local fire rangers just point-blank tell property owners "If you don't clear out all the brush and downed trees within a couple hundred feet of your structures, we're defending your house after the others that meet code" but no politician is willing to tell voters that. Worse, land owners continue to get permits issued to construct permanent dwellings in isolated locations which are extremely difficult to defend. If they want to build there, I say let them but also issue fair warning if they choose to proceed, they are on their own in the event of fire. Volunteer firefighters shouldn't need to risk their lives to defend houses which should never have been built in inaccessible, indefensible locations.
Wildfire suppression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildfire_suppression#Tactics
History of wildfire suppression in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppressio...
Controlled burn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn
> A controlled or prescribed burn, also known as hazard reduction burning, [1] backfire, swailing, or a burn-off, [2] is a fire set intentionally for purposes of forest management, fire suppression, farming, prairie restoration or greenhouse gas abatement. A controlled burn may also refer to the intentional burning of slash and fuels through burn piles. [3] Fire is a natural part of both forest and grassland ecology and controlled fire can be a tool for foresters.
Hydrogel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel
Aerogel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
Water-based batteries have less fire risk FWIU
"1,000% Difference: Major Storage Capacity in Water-Based Batteries Found" (2023) https://scitechdaily.com/1000-difference-major-storage-capac...
> The metal-free water-based batteries are unique from those that utilize cobalt in their lithium-ion form. The research group’s focus on this type of battery stems from a desire for greater control over the domestic supply chain as cobalt and lithium are commonly sourced from outside the country. Additionally, the batteries’ safer chemistry could prevent fires.
That's a good list of useful links. From my experience as a home owner in a high-risk area, I'd add some of the things which can make a big difference are often surprisingly simple. In addition to managing your own land properly, make sure you have a large enough water tank to support firefighters in protecting your land. We got a well tank five times bigger than our typical usage needs. Another key thing is to put your tank next to where a fire truck can access it easily and get the proper adapter installed so the fire truck can direct connect to your tank (it's not included in most).
We also widened the access road on our property to support larger fire trucks and dozers. Obviously, fire-resistant construction materials and techniques are a huge help and not all require extensive retrofitting. There are spark resistant attic air access covers which are easy to install. We needed to re-roof and remodel anyway so we went with fire-resistant roofing and concrete siding. It's also important to have non-cellular local communications because the cell towers often go out first (our community uses 2-meter handsets for emergency comms). Doing those things along with the fact we've cleared all trees and brush out beyond 300 feet and only have metal out-buildings caused our local fire chief to comment that if everyone did what we've done, protecting the whole region would be three times easier. We also have enough generator power (on auto-failover) to pump our own well water to wet down our house and surroundings. With that our house has a really strong probability of surviving with no external help even if our property is directly hit by a major wildfire.
Edit to Add: I forgot to mention another key thing. If you live in a place like this, there's often only a single narrow public road serving your property and others nearby. Make sure you have transportation that'll let you get out cross-country if the road is blocked by either fire or heavy equipment. We have AWD ATVs fueled and always ready to go (plus they are handy around big properties like this). Between us and our neighbors we have a plan to get everyone on our road out without outside help - including a few elderly folk who will need assistance. Firefighters needing to rescue unprepared residents diverts vital resources from fighting the fire and clogs roads - which just makes everything else worse.
Great comments and advice. My neighborhood burned in the #GlassFire [0]. While our property was severely damaged, our home survived, due to many of the hardening techniques you mentioned and great work by CalFire. We had evacuated the night before and were staying in a local hotel watching the flames advance on our house via our security cameras. (Redundant net connections and a generator kept everything online). As our deck started to burn I called 911 to report it, figuring nothing would happen. About 20 minutes later a fireman walked into the frame of the camera and 2 minutes later the deck was out and the house was saved. I was cheering like I won the Super Bowl. So I really appreciate all the hardening I did, on-site water and CalFire.
When we rebuilt the exterior, I installed a set of sprinklers that ring the house and cover the roof/deck. They are not designed to fight the fire, instead I can activate them before a fire arrives to get things good and wet. This perimeter reduces the available fuels, reduces the heat load on the structure and reduces the risk of ember cast. It was a fun project with an ESP controller to sequence the valves and provide remote control.
Over the last few years, the Alert Wildfire Camera system, now over 700 cameras, has been a valuable resource. [1] Early detection of the fire, before it grows to extreme size has made a big difference. In the North Bay of California last year, this early detection and CalFire having nearby Air Attack resources on standby kept many small fires from becoming large ones in this area.
Another great resource is the Watch Duty app. [2] This is a non-profit, volunteer, but extremely professional service. They started in Northern California and are rapidly expanding. It is the go-to resource for Wildfire related information in the area.
Lastly, if anyone is looking at the X prize for satellite detection, I’d spend some time researching MODIS/VIIRS data products from NASA. [3]. A good starting point in some of the challenges of wildfire detection from space.
[0]. Fire tornado outside my window. https://youtu.be/1tZjWqh3-EU
[1]. https://www.alertwildfire.org/
TIL about building materials and fire hazard:
Fire resistance rating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-resistance_rating
R-value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-value_(insulation)
Here's a prompt to help with selecting sustainable building materials: """Generate a JSON-LD document of data with citations comparing building materials by: R-value, Fire Resistance Rating, typical structural integrity longevity in terms of years, VOCs at year 1 and year 5, and Sustainability factors like watt-hours and carbon and other pollutive outputs to produce, transport, distribute, install, and maintain . Include hempcrete (hemp and lime, which can be made from algae), rammed earth with and without shredded hemp hurds, wood, structural concrete, bamboo, and other emerging sustainable building materials.
Demonstrate loading the JSON data into a Pandas DataFrame and how to sort by multiple columns (with references to the docs for the tools used), and how to load the data into pygwalker."""
> a set of sprinklers that ring the house and cover the roof/deck. They are not designed to fight the fire, instead I can activate them before a fire arrives to get things good and wet. This perimeter reduces the available fuels, reduces the heat load on the structure and reduces the risk of ember cast. It was a fun project with an ESP controller to sequence the valves and provide remote control.
I searched a bit and couldn't find any smart home integrations that automatically hopefully turn the lawn and garden sprinklers on when a fire alarm goes off.
Are there any good reasons to not have that be a standard default feature if both smoke detectors and sprinklers are connected to a smart home system?
Coming from an operations perspective, you want to look at the downstream consequences of automation which depend on the details of the installed system. E.g. from this thread: automation might drain water from the 5x oversized well tank before firefighters arrive, seems to me that whether or not that is preferable depends on the details.
> Hydrogel
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572664456210948104 :
>> What about #CO² -based #hydrogels for fire fighting?
>> /? Hydrogel firefighting (2022) https://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogel+firefighting […]
>> IDEA: How to make #hydrogels (and #aerogels) from mostly just {air*, CO², algae, shade, and sunshine,} [on earth, and eventually in space,]?
> Aerogel
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1600820322567041024 :
> Problem: #airogel made of CO² is an excellent insulator that's useful for many applications; but it needs structure, so foam+airogel but that requires smelly foam
> Possible solution: Cause structure to form in the airogel.
Backpack shoulder straps on e.g. Jansport backpacks have a geometric rubber mesh that's visible through a plastic window.
## Possible methods of causing structure to form in aerogel
- EM Hz: literally play EM waves (and possibly deliberately inverse convolutions) at the {#airogel,} production process
- Titratation
- Centrifugation
- "Volt grid": apply volts/amps/Hz patterns with a probe array
- Thermal/photonic bath 3d printing
- Pour a lattice-like lens as large as the aerogel sections and allow solar to cause it to slowly congeal to a more structural form in advantageous shapes
- Die-casting, pressure-injection molding
> Water-based batteries have less fire risk FWIU
CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage and Gravitational potential energy storage also have less fire risk then Lithium Ion batteries.
FWIU we already have enough abandoned mines in the world to do all of our energy storage needs?
Could CAES tanks filled with air+CO² help suppress wildfire?
> FWIU we already have enough abandoned mines in the world to do all of our energy storage needs?
Here's a prompt for this one, for the AI:
"Let's think step-by-step: how much depth or volume of empty mines are needed to solve for US energy storage demand with gravitational potential energy storage drones on or off tracks in abandoned mines? Please respond with constants and code as Python SymPy code with a pytest test_main and Hypothesis @given decorator tests"
Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal
Hi HN,
Frogmouth is a TUI to display Markdown files. It does a passable job of displaying Markdown, with code blocks and tables. No image support as yet.
It's very browser like, with navigation stack, history, and bookmarks. Works with both the mouse and keyboard.
There are shortcuts for viewing README.md files and other Markdown on GitHub and GitLab.
License is MIT.
Let me know what you think...
Could Frogmouth display Markdown cells in Jupyter Notebooks on the CLI?
FWIW, IPython is built with Python Prompt Toolkit and Jupyter_console is IPython for non-python kernels; `conda install -y jupyter_console; jupyter kernelspec -h`. But those only do `%logstart -o example.out.py`; Markdown in notebooks on the CLI is basically unheard-of.
I would like to run VSCode with a TUI like this in a terminal via SSH.
Does anyone know a VSCode extension to do this?
FWIU coc.vim works with vim and nvim and works with VSCode LSP support: https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
There are many LSP implementations: https://langserver.org/
awesome-neovim Ctrl-F "DAP": https://github.com/rockerBOO/awesome-neovim#lsp
mason.nvim: https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim :
> Portable package manager for Neovim that runs everywhere Neovim runs. Easily install and manage LSP servers, DAP servers, linters, and formatters.
conda-forge
DAP: Debug Adapter Protocol https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/implement...
COC has been mostly deprecated for native LSPs also. I run ~same pyright I'd use in VSCode in my neovim.
Stanford, Harvard data science no more
Do Stanford or Harvard have a UC BIDS: UC Berkeley Institute of Data Science?
> This is the [open] textbook for the Foundations of Data Science class at UC Berkeley: "Computational and Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science" http://inferentialthinking.com/ (JupyterBook w/ notebooks and MyST Markdown)
> [#1 Undergrad Data Science program, #2 ranked Graduate Statistics program]
Data literacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_literacy :
> Data literacy is distinguished from statistical literacy since it involves understanding what data means, including the ability to read graphs and charts as well as draw conclusions from data.[6] Statistical literacy, on the other hand, refers to the "ability to read and interpret summary statistics in everyday media" such as graphs, tables, statements, surveys, and studies. [6]
Data Literacy and Statistical Literacy are essential for good leadership. For citizens to be capable of Evidence-Based Policy, we need Data Driven Journalism (DDJ) and curricular data science in the public high schools.
Debugging a Mixed Python and C Language Stack
GDB can decode Python stack traces as Python code, as long as you have have python-gdb.py from the Python source distribution in the same place as your Python executable.
From https://github.com/jupyterlab/debugger/issues/284 en ENH: Mixed Python/C debugging (GDB,) #284
> "Users can do [mixed mode] debugging with GDB (and/or other debuggers) and log the session in a notebook; in particular in order to teach.
> Your question is specifically about IDEs with support for mixed-mode debugging (with gdb), so I went looking for an answer:
> https://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb (which is not responsive and almost unreadable on a mobile device) links to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/EasierPythonDebuggin... , which mentions the py-list, py-up and py-down, py-bt, py-print, and py-locals GDB commands that are also described in * https://devguide.python.org/gdb/ *
> https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDebuggingTools Ctrl-F "gdb" mentions: DDD, pyclewn (vim), trepan3k (which is gdb-like and supports breaking at c-line and also handles bytecode disassembly)
> Apparently, GHIDRA does not have a debugger but there is a plugin for following along with gdb in ghidra called https://github.com/Comsecuris/gdbghidra [...] https://github.com/Comsecuris/gdbghidra/blob/master/data/gdb... (zero dependencies)
> https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1392/... lists a number of GUIs for GDB; including voltronnn:
>> There's Voltron, which is an extensible Python debugger UI that supports LLDB, GDB, VDB, and WinDbg/CDB (via PyKD) and runs on macOS, Linux and Windows. For the first three it supports x86, x86_64, and arm with even arm64 support for lldb while adding even powerpc support for gdb. https://github.com/snare/voltron
> "The GDB Python API" https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/11/10/gdb-python-api... describes the GDB Python API.
> https://pythonextensionpatterns.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deb... may be helpful [for writing-a-c-function-to-call-any-python-unit-test]
> The GDB Python API docs: https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Python-API.html
> The devguide gdb page may be the place to list IDEs with support for mixed-mode debugging of Python and C/C++/Cython specifically with gdb?
These days, we have CFFI and Apache Arrow for C+Python etc.
https://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb lists the GDB debugging symbol packages for various distros
FWIU Fedora GDB now optionally automatically installs debug syms; from attempting to debug TuxMath SDL with GDB before just installing the Flatpak.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2021/09/08/debugging-... (2021) describes more recent efforts to improve Python debugging with c extensions
Teach at a Community College
> Learning to teach
To learn, teach.
For contrast, there's also:
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Not that I 100% agree with that.
If none teach, few can do or teach.
"This is where teachers are paid the most" (2021) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/teachers-pay-countrie... :
> Globally, teachers’ salaries vary hugely, according to the OECD’s Education At A Glance 2021 report
Twitter drops “Government-funded”/“state-affiliated“ from NPR, BBC, RT, Xinhua
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to retain the existing label, link to the resource indicating how much state financial support and/or editorial control, and also label other publishers by their known revenue methods:
- advertising supported
- directly politically supported
- PAC-funded
- SPAC-funded
- nonprofit organization [in territories x, y, z]
And maybe also their methods of journalism; in the interest of evidence-based policy by way of evidence-based journalism:
- Source and Method
- Motive and Intent
- Admissibility vs Publishability
- What else?
Media literacy > Media literacy education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_literacy#Media_literacy_...
- Do they require disclosure of editorial conflicts of interest?
- Do they require disclosure of journalistic conflicts of interest?
- Do they allow citations?
- Do they require citations?
- Do they list the DOI string in the citation or a dx.doi.org URL for NewsArticles about ScholarlyArticles?
- Which contributors are paid?
- Which parent company owns the media outlet?
Physicists discover that gravity can create light
All quantum fields have their vacuum energy fluctuations. When we change the parameters of the space (e.g. stretch or compress it), the current state is no longer the ground state but becomes a so-called squeezed vacuum state.
This effect is used in laser physics to "split photons" in spontaneous parametric downconversion. That is, an intense laser changes the refractive index of a medium periodically. These oscillations generate a squeezed vacuum state.
Is there a corollary SQG Superfluid Quantum Gravity fluidic description of squeezed coherent states?
And what of a Particle-Wave-Fluid triality?
Noting that I attempted to link to relevant research and cite the source for fluidic corollaries but was prevented from contributing. https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-35661155
FWIW, so inspired, I continued to write a few better prompts for all of this.
"""Explain how specific (for example Fedi and Turok's) theories of gravitons and superfluidity differ from General Relativity, the Standard Model, prevailing theories of Quantum Gravity and dark matter and/or dark energy non-uniform correction coefficients, classical fluid dynamics, and quantum chaos theory in regards to specific phenomena in the quantum foam.
Also, are is there one wave function or are there many; and are they related by operators expressible with qubit quantum computers or are qudits and qutrits necessary to sufficiently model this domain of n body gravity gravitons in a fluid field?
If graviton fields result in photons, what are the conservation symmetry relations in regards to the exchange of gravitons for photons?"""
And then (though apparently currently one must remove "must use `dask_ml.model_selection.GridSearchCV`" presumably due to current response length limits of Google Bard):
"""Design an experiment as a series of steps and Python code to test (1) whether Bernoulli's equations describe gravitons in a superfluidic field; and also (2) there is conservational symmetry in exchange of gravitons and photons. The Python code must use `dask_ml.model_selection.GridSearchCV`, must use SymPy, define constants in the `__dict__` attribute of a class, return experimental output as a `dict`, have pytest tests and Hypothesis `@given` decorator tests, and a `main(argv=sys.argv)` function with a pytest `test_main`, and use `asyncio`."""
Manipulative Consent Requests
"fraudulent redefinition of consent"
Unconscionability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability :
> Unconscionability (sometimes known as unconscionable dealing/conduct in Australia) is a doctrine in contract law that describes terms that are so extremely unjust, or overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of the party who has the superior bargaining power, that they are contrary to good conscience. Typically, an unconscionable contract is held to be unenforceable because no reasonable or informed person would otherwise agree to it. The perpetrator of the conduct is not allowed to benefit, because the consideration offered is lacking, or is so obviously inadequate, that to enforce the contract would be unfair to the party seeking to escape the contract.
Statute of frauds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_frauds :
> A statute of frauds is a form of statute requiring that certain kinds of contracts be memorialized in writing, signed by the party against whom they are to be enforced, with sufficient content to evidence the contract. [1][2] […]
> Raising the defense: A defendant in a contract case who wants to use the statute of frauds as a defense must raise it as an affirmative defense in a timely manner. [7] The burden of proving that a written contract exists comes into play only when a statute of frauds defense is raised by the defendant.
Statute of frauds > United States > Uniform Commercial Code: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_frauds#Uniform_Co... :
> Uniform Commercial Code: In addition to general statutes of frauds, under Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), every state except Louisiana has adopted an additional statute of frauds that relates to the sale of goods. Pursuant to the UCC, contracts for the sale of goods where the price equals $500 or more fall under the statute of frauds, with the exceptions for professional merchants performing their normal business transactions, and for any custom-made items designed for one specific buyer. [42]
IIUC, that means that if the USD amount of a contract for future performance is over $500 the court would regard a statute of frauds argument as just cause for dismissal? Or just goods?
Proliferation of AI weapons among non-state actors could be impossible to stop
Artificial intelligence arms race > Proposals for international regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_arms_r...
Counterproliferation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterproliferation :
> In contrast to nonproliferation, which focuses on diplomatic, legal, and administrative measures to dissuade and impede the acquisition of such weapons, counterproliferation focuses on intelligence, law enforcement, and sometimes military action to prevent their acquisition. [2]
...
def hasRightTo_(person) -> bool:
def hasRight(thing, right) -> bool:
def haveEqualRights(persons:Iterable, rights:Iterable[Callable]) -> bool:
Source, Method; Motive, IntentOnly one pair of distinct positive integers satisfy the equation m^n = n^m
I think taking logs is an unnecessary indirection in the given proof. If n^m = m^n then raising both sides to the power of 1/(nm) gives us n^(1/n) = m^(1/m). So we are looking for two distinct positive integers at which the function x ↦ x^(1/x) takes the same value. The rest of the proof then goes as before.
Differentiating the above function yields (1/x^2)(1-log(x))x^(1/x), which is positive when log(x) < 1 and negative when log(x) > 1. So the function has a maximum at e and decreases on either side of it. Therefore one of our integers must be less than e, and the other greater than it. For the smaller integer there are only two possibilities, 1 and 2. Using 1 doesn't give a solution since the equation x^(1/x) = 1 only has the solution 1. So the only remaining possibility for the smaller number is 2, which does yield the solution 2^4 = 4^2. Since x^(1/x) is strictly decreasing when x > e, there can't be any other solutions with the same value.
Logs will appear no matter what, at some point in the line of reasoning. They are only held back until differentiating in this approach. I think the expression for the derivative of logn/n was much nicer to grapple with.
Seeing as we're in the integer world, I'm not sure logs need to show up ever, there's probably a proof path around unique prime factorisations. E.g. it's more or less immediately obvious that n and m would need to share the same prime factors in the same ratios.
This back-and-forth makes me wonder, is it possible to write proofs about proofs? e.g., you cannot prove this result without logarithms or there must exist a proof that involves prime factors?
I suppose at least some proofs vaguely like that are possible because Gödel's incompleteness theorem is one, although I suspect that that same theorem puts some constraints on these "metaproofs."
Axiomatic system > Axiomatic method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_system#Axiomatic_met...
Inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference ; inductive, deductive, abductive
Propositional calculus > Proofs in propositional calculus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus
Quantum logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1609495237738496000 :
> [ Is quantum logic the correct or a sufficient logic for propositional logic? ]
What are quantum "expectation values"; and how is that Axiomatic wave operator system different from standard propositional calculus?
Show HN: IPython-GPT, a Jupyter/IPython Interface to Chat GPT
This would be great in conjunction with e.g. papermill for running the same prompts over time and with the model as a parameter.
Do IPython-GPT or jetmlgpt work in JupyterLite in WASM in a browser tab?
I have only tested jetmlgpt using Jupyter notebooks.
JupyterLite How to docs: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/index.htm...
"Create a custom kernel" https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/extension... :
> We recommend checking out how to create a server extension first
It may also be possible to just pip install the plain python package with micropip, or include it in a `jupyterlite build`; From https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/237#issuec... re: 'micropip':
%pip install $@
# __import__('piplite').install($@)
Congrats on the launch!
I created Mito, a spreadsheet the lives inside of Jupyter. We've seen a ton of our users using Jupyter and ChatGPT playground side by side.
We're also experimenting with bringing chatgpt into Jupyter through the Mito spreadsheet. (https://blog.trymito.io/5-lessons-learned-from-adding-chatgp...)
Looking forward to trying this out.
Cocalc also has new "generate a Jupyter Notebook from a [ChatGPT] prompt" functionality. https://twitter.com/cocalc_com/status/1644427430223028225
'2023-04-19: LaTeX + ChatGPT "Help me fix this..." buttons into our LaTeX editor' https://cocalc.com/news/latex-chatgpt-help-me-fix-this-butto...
Building a ChatGPT-enhanced Python REPL
"Show HN: IPython-GPT, a Jupyter/IPython Interface to Chat GPT" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35580959 lists a few REPLs
When you buy a book, you can loan it to anyone – a judge says libraries can’t
The headline isn't mentioned in the opinion piece? What the judge ruled was:
> An ebook recast from a print book is a paradigmatic example of a derivative work.
In other words, if a library buy a book, they can't just digitise it and share it without permission.
I'd go so far as to say the article directly contradicts the headline.
The author spends an enormous amount of time explaining how the rights of "end users" have been cemented, such as the right to change formats. If a consumer lends a book, they are, by definition, no longer the "end user" and none of that precedent applies.
It's probably true that anyone can lend a book but that's not an "end user" right. In fact, that allowance is the very reason libraries can exist in the first place.
The case and article are about something completely different (making copies, then distributing the copies). Odd headline.
> that allowance
Right to property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property
Brain images just got 64 million times sharper
9.4 T is quite a strong magnetic field, as it is half the strength of the magnetic field used for plasma confinement in Tokamak Energy’s Demo4 facility. Scaling this technology for human-sized animals will likely be incredibly expensive, but the 5 micron accuracy is surely worth the investment.
7T is already regularly used for human research, and approval for human usage has been granted for 10.5T and I believe for 11.7T (though I'm not sure how many images they've gotten out of that yet).
Yes it is incredibly expensive, but it is in fact already done.
https://thedebrief.org/impossible-photonic-breakthrough-scie... :
> For decades, that [Abbe diffraction] limit has operated as a sort of roadblock to engineering materials, drugs, or other objects at scales smaller than the wavelength of light manipulating them. But now, the researchers from Southampton, together with scientists from the universities of Dortmund and Regensburg in Germany, have successfully demonstrated that a beam of light can not only be confined to a spot that is 50 times smaller than its own wavelength but also “in a first of its kind” the spot can be moved by minuscule amounts at the point where the light is confined.
> According to that research, the key to confining light below the previous impermeable Abbe diffraction limit was accomplished by “storing a part of the electromagnetic energy in the kinetic energy of electric charges.” This clever adaptation, the researchers wrote, “opened the door to a number of groundbreaking real-world applications, which has contributed to the great success of the field of nanophotonics.”
> “Looking to the future, in principle, it could lead to the manipulation of micro and nanometre-sized objects, including biological particles,” De Liberato says, “or perhaps the sizeable enhancement of the sensitivity resolution of microscopic sensors.”
"Electrons turn piece of wire into laser-like light source" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33493885
Could such inexpensive coherent laser light sources reduce medical and neuroimaging costs?
"A simple technique to overcome self-focusing, filamentation, supercontinuum generation, aberrations, depth dependence and waveguide interface roughness using fs laser processing" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&hl=en&as_sdt=5,4... :
> Several detrimental effects limit the use of ultrafast lasers in multi-photon processing and the direct manufacture of integrated photonics devices, not least, dispersion, aberrations, depth dependence, undesirable ablation at a surface, limited depth of writing, nonlinear optical effects such as supercontinuum generation and filamentation due to Kerr self-focusing. We show that all these effects can be significantly reduced if not eliminated using two coherent, ultrafast laser-beams through a single lens - which we call the Dual-Beam technique. Simulations and experimental measurements at the focus are used to understand how the Dual-Beam technique can mitigate these problems. The high peak laser intensity is only formed at the aberration-free tightly localised focal spot, simultaneously, suppressing unwanted nonlinear side effects for any intensity or processing depth. Therefore, we believe this simple and innovative technique makes the fs laser capable of much more at even higher intensities than previously possible, allowing applications in multi-photon processing, bio-medical imaging, laser surgery of cells, tissue and in ophthalmology, along with laser writing of waveguides.
TL Transfer Learning might be useful for training a model to predict e.g. [portable] low-field MRI with NIRS Infrared and/or Ultrasound? FWIU, "Mind2Mind" is one way to ~train a GAN from another already-trained GAN?
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1609498590367420416 :
> Idea: Do sensor fusion with all available sensors timecoded with landmarks, and then predict the expensive MRI/CT from low cost sensors
> Are there implied molecular structures that can be inferred from low-cost {NIRS, Light field, [...]} sensor data?
> Task: Learn a function f() such that f(lowcost_sensor_data) -> expensive_sensor_data
FWIU OpenWater has moved to NIRS+Ultrasound for ~ live in surgery MRI-level imaging and now treatment?
FWIU certain Infrared light wavelengths cause neuronal growth; and Blue and Green inhibit neuronal growth.
What are the comparative advantage and disadvantages of these competing medical imaging and neuroimaging capabilities?
Can a technology like this at some point be used for brain uploads? Or like a cheaper and better version of cryonics - to "backup" the brain until it can be resurrected in some way?
If quantum information is never destroyed – and classical information is quantum information without the complex term i – perhaps our brain states are already preserved in the universe; like reflections in water droplets in the quantum foam.
Lagrangian points, non-intersecting paths through accretion discs, and microscopic black holes all preserve data - modulated energy; information - for some time before reversible or unreversible transformation.
Perhaps Superfluid quantum gravity can afford insight into the interior topology of black holes and other quantum foam phenomena?
(Edit)
Coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coping
Defence mechanisms § Level 4: mature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism#Level_4:_mat...
MRI brain images become 64M times sharper
Other thread from earlier today: "Brain images just got 64 million times sharper" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615778
There’s no universal cordless power tool battery – why?
From "USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27295621 :
> What are the costs to add a USB PD module to an electronic device? https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/easy-usb%E2%80%91c-power-for...
> - [ ] Create an industry standard interface for charging and using [power tool,] battery packs; and adapters
From "Zero energy ready homes are coming" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35065366 :
# USB power specs (DC)
7.5w = 1.5amp * 5volts # USB
15w = 3a * 5v # USB-C
100w = 5a * 20v # USB-C PD
240w = 5a * 48v # USB-C PD 3.1
Aura – Python source code auditing and static analysis on a large scale (2022)
Unfortunately, there hasn't been a release since 2021, Similarly no commits to the branches master, or dev in the past ~14 months.
Hello, author of Aura here. The project is in fact active! But in a different branch called "ambience". Which is a very big refactor into transforming Aura (which is now designed to be run locally as tui) into server/web application. It would allow to automatically monitor and audit all used python packages in an organization by using an http reverse proxy to intercept python package installations. It's taking me currently long time to finish that big refactor as I am currently the only active developer there so apologies if the project seems to be abandoned, I'm just hesitating to merge the changes from ambience branch into main (which is what people see) as the new refactor is not stable yet as compared to master & dev as that was tested and tuned on the whole PyPI.
Very early alpha version is available here: https://ambience.sourcecode.ai if someone is interested in checking it out.
Could aura scan packages at the pulp pypi proxy? https://github.com/pulp
I haven't used pulp so I am not sure but yes in theory. Several schemes are currently supported via URIs (pypi://, git://, http(s):// etc...) so if the destination to scan can be formatted as one of the already supported URI schemes then you can already scan it. URI providers are also using plugin architecture so adding a new one for better integration with pulp (such as autodiscovering packages) should be trivial. Thank you for the suggestion, the pulp project looks interesting and I would definitely check it out!
Gitea can also (scan and build and test and) host python packages [1], conda packages [2], container images, etc.
[1] https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/usage/packages/pypi/
[2] https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/usage/packages/conda/
https:// URLs probably already solve for scanning Python packages hosted by Gitea and/or Pulp with Aura.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563857 :
> Additional lists of static analysis, dynamic analysis, SAST, DAST, and other source code analysis tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511280 https://analysis-tools.dev/tools?languages=python
A new approach to computation reimagines artificial intelligence
Before reading the paper's obliquely mentioned in the article: How is this different from embeddings?
After reading the papers: How is this different from embeddings?
All three of the papers linked to are closed access. (Did I miss one?)
If anyone can link a favorite review paper on this approach, you'd be doing us a favor.
Edit: one of them does link to a preprint version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04571
Great, and the implementation (Neuro-vector-symbolic architectures):
"A Neuro-vector-symbolic Architecture for Solving Raven's Progressive Matrices" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04571 :
> […] our proposed neuro-vector-symbolic architecture (NVSA) [implements] powerful operators on high-dimensional distributed representations that serve as a common language between neural networks and symbolic AI. The efficacy of NVSA is demonstrated by solving the Raven's progressive matrices datasets. Compared to state-of-the-art deep neural network and neuro-symbolic approaches, end-to-end training of NVSA achieves a new record of 87.7% average accuracy in RAVEN, and 88.1% in I-RAVEN datasets. Moreover, compared to the symbolic reasoning within the neuro-symbolic approaches, the probabilistic reasoning of NVSA with less expensive operations on the distributed representations is two orders of magnitude faster.
A number system invented by Inuit schoolchildren
I dislike these pseudo-scientific claims about alternative number systems and methods of paper and pencil arithmetic:
> Because of the tally-inspired design, arithmetic using the Kaktovik numerals is strikingly visual. Addition, subtraction and even long division become almost geometric. The Hindu-Arabic digits are an awkward system, Bartley says, but “the students found, with their numerals, they could solve problems a better way, a faster way.”
I think the students can be praised for having come up with simple to understand and write number system that corresponds to the conventions for counting in Alaskan Inuit language, and it seems appropriate to capture these notations in upcoming Unicode standards.
However, spending time learning base 20 arithmetic has obvious disadvantages that the article ignores. The times tables, memorized in grade school and fundamental to paper and pencil calculations, are now four times larger. Base 20 is not a popular notation for numbers. One important advantage of the number system (Hindu-Arabic) that most of the world uses is that most of the world uses it. I grew up with inches and degrees Fahrenheit and had to learn the metric system to pursue my science education. I'm glad I didn't have to learn how to count as well. We shouldn't make it harder for these kids to enjoy the rest of the world's books, journals, and internet resources about math and science.
> “the students found, with their numerals, they could solve problems a better way, a faster way”
> Base 20 is not a popular notation for numbers […] We shouldn't make it harder for these kids
So much of what you object to is that something they’ve found more intuitive and engaging isn’t what unintuitive disengaging stuff they’ll encounter. But developing intuition for math is far more valuable than developing conformance to how it’s supposed to be done. Who cares if that intuition is developed with some idiosyncrasy from what you consider normal? The math is math, the principles are consistent, the knowledge is transferable. Insisting they learn the same things a different way is totally arbitrary and counterproductive.
I think parent's point is not cultural as you are implying but rather practical. Learning in a base that nobody uses could be easier today and an hindrance later.
I think, all in all, this should not be a big deal. For the gifted kid, they'll find a way to adapt and become the next Einstein. As for the ungifted, it might give them a better leg up and allow them to perform better than they would have, so it's probably a plus anyways.
Finger binary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary :
> Finger binary is a system for counting and displaying binary numbers on the fingers of either or both hands. Each finger represents one binary digit or bit. This allows counting from zero to 31 using the fingers of one hand, or 1023 using both: that is, up to 2**5−1 or 2**10−1 respectively.
- "How to count to 1000 on two hands" by 3blue1brown https://youtu.be/1SMmc9gQmHQ
- "Polynesian People Used Binary Numbers 600 Years Ago - Scientific American" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/polynesian-people...
What is the comparative value of radixes like Binary, Octal, andHexadecimal compared to Decimal (radix 10)?
Perhaps a radix like eπI would be more useful; though some amost-mystic physicists do tend to radix 9: "nonary" (which is actually ~ also radix-3).
List of numeral systems > By culture / time period, By type of notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numeral_systems :
> Numeral systems are classified here as to whether they use positional notation (also known as place-value notation), and further categorized by radix or base.
Digital computing hardware design
I always make a point of demonstrating finger-binary with the number 132. 4 will suffice, though.
California DMV wants to issue car titles as NFTs
Can this also be solved with W3C Verified Claims and ~ https://blockcerts.org/ (and an append-only, multiply distributed/synchronized/replicated/redundantly-backed-up permissioned database/Blockchain)?
And then, again, what is the TPS of the DB? How many read and write Transactions Per Second do the candidate datastores support with or without strong Consistency, Availability, and/or Partition Tolerance? And then what about cryptographic Data Integrity assurances.
FWIU, issuing shares on a Blockchain is challenging due to lost keys / shared cryptographic keys and reissuance?
"Possible" and "beneficial" are separate questions entirely.
The whole point of government is to be a central authority. That's the DMV's entire job: to be a central authority for driver's licenses and vehicle titles. Their database isn't open for everybody to modify, and it also shouldn't be. It also shouldn't be open for everybody to read, because we have a right to privacy.
What benefit does the DMV get from hosting its records on a blockchain? And what happens if that blockchain stops attracting miners? Does the DMV have to mine it? Does the price of mining rigs start to affect how much it costs to register your car? What happens if they get hit by a 51% attack?
Your average Californian is definitely not a crypto user, and doesn't have a digital wallet. One in twenty don't even speak English. What happens when somebody loses their private key? If you have to keep those keys in a conventional database, then a blockchain makes zero sense except as a money-waster.
There is nothing wrong with them just running a regular database, with normal SRE stuff like backups and replication. The California DMV has a lot of problems. But "how do we store records?" isn't one of them.
It takes patience to keep politely explaining the inadequacies of "5 people and the manager and the owner share the sole root backup credentials - which aren't cryptographic keys, so there is no way to tell whether data has been rewritten without the correct key - and tape backup responsibilities; and we have no way to verify the online database against the tape backups [so, can we write it off now]"
Notes on centralized databases with Merkel hashes : https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Ctrl-F "trillian", "iavl"
If you've ever set up SQL replication before, you wouldn't be claiming it's adequate.
Are RDS and CloudSQL good enough? What does Accumulo do differently?
Show HN: Skip the SSO Tax, access your user data with OSS
As the former CTO of an Insurtech and Fintech startup I always had the “pleasure” to keep regulators and auditors happy. Think of documenting who has access to what, quarterly access reviews, yearly audits and so on…
Like many others we couldn’t justify the Enterprise-plan for every SaaS tool to simply get access to SSO and SCIM/SAML APIs. For Notion alone the cost would have nearly doubled to $14 per user per month. That’s insane! Mostly unknown to people, SSO Tax also limits access to APIs that are used for managing user access (SCIM/SAML).
This has proven to be an incredibly annoying roadblock that prevented me from doing anything useful with our user data: - You want to download the current list of users and their permissions? Forget about it! - You want to centrally assign user roles and permissions? Good luck with that! - You want to delete user accounts immediately? Yeah right, like that's ever gonna happen!
It literally cost me hours to update our access matrix at the end of every quarter for our access reviews and manually assigning user accounts and permissions.
I figured, there must be a better way than praying to the SaaS gods to miraculously make the SSO Tax disappear (and open up SCIM/SAML along the way). That’s why I sat down a few weeks ago and started building OpenOwl (https://github.com/AccessOwl/open_owl). It allows me to just plug in my user credentials and automatically download user lists, including permissions from SaaS tools.
Granted, OpenOwl is still a work in progress, and it's not perfect. At the moment it's limited to non-SSO login flows and covers only 7 SaaS vendors. My favorite part is that you can configure integrations as “recipes”. The goal was for anybody to be able to add new integrations (IT managers and developers alike). Therefore you ideally don’t even have to write any new code, just tell OpenOwl how the new SaaS vendor works.
What do you think? Have you dealt with manually maintaining a list of users and their permissions? Could this approach get us closer to overcoming parts of the SSO Tax?
For those wondering what the "SSO Tax" is, it refers to the excessive pricing practiced by SaaS providers to access the SSO feature on their product.
A documented rant has made the rounds at https://sso.tax , which lists all vendors and their pricing of SSO.
I always thought this was insane, but now I wonder if "SSO Pricing"/tax is just the "real price" and the "Base pricing" is really the new free trial? Of course the SSO/real pricing is too high, and everyone negotiates it down, but the point is I suspect the "base pricing" is just a trial teaser that's probably not sustainable for many vendors in terms of margins. I'm just guessing here, maybe someone with some inside insight from one of these vendors can advise.
I'd rather consider it "SME pricing" vs "Enterprise pricing". Typically only companies above a certain size use SSO systems, and even larger ones require it for everything. Coincidentally bigger companies are also willing to pay more, so putting a high price on SSO enables SaaS to profit from those deep pockets without pricing themselves out of the market for smaller companies.
Schools, colleges, and universities typically have SSO but no budget or purchase authority.
Just slap an education discount on it and call it a day. There are plenty of reasons to do that anyway, you want students to get trained on your software and use it in their formative years as much as possible.
Many go even further and just give the product away for free for educational institutions and individual students (Github, Jetbrains and Tableau come to mind as examples)
https://github.com/doncicuto/glim :
> Glim is a simple identity access management system that speaks some LDAP and has a REST API to manage users and groups
"Proxy LDAP to limit scope of access #60" https://github.com/doncicuto/glim/issues/60
Twitter Is Blocking Likes and Retweets that Mention Substack
In December they tried to ban mentioning any non-Twitter usernames:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/18/twitter-wont-let-you-post-...
Isn't that completely contradictory to their supporting free speech mission?
It sure looks like someone has hijacked Elon and Jack and run off with those operations.
Maybe you have to add the year to the search query to find search results from before when Donny got kicked out fairly for serial disrespect.
Become a more effective censorship apparatus.
What "supporting free speech mission" are you referring to?
https://investor.twitterinc.com/contact/faq/default.aspx :
> What is Twitter's mission statement?
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation
"Defending and respecting the rights of people using our service" https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/defending-and...
Ha nice. That doesn't actually say "free speech" but point taken. Of course mission statements are always meaningless, but still, point taken.
PEP 684 was accepted – Per-interpreter GIL in Python 3.12
This is great and was a huge effort by Eric Snow and collaborators to make it happen.
To be clear, this is not "PEP 703 – Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython", by Sam Gross. PEP 703 is more ambitious and add quite a bit of complexity to the CPython implementation. PEP 684 mostly cleans things up and encapsulates global state better. The most distruptive change is to allow immortal objects. I hope PEP 703 can go in too, even with the downsides (complexity, bit slower single threaded performance).
"PEP 703 – Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython" (2023) https://github.com/python/peps/blob/main/pep-0703.rst https://peps.python.org/pep-0703/
colesbury/nogil https://github.com/colesbury/nogil :
docker run -it nogil/python
docker run -it nogil/python-cudaDetection of Common Cold from Speech Signals Using Deep Neural Network
"Detection of COVID-19 from voice, cough and breathing patterns: Dataset and preliminary results" (2021) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=5,47&sciodt=...
Pandas 2.0
I'm curious if there will be any appreciable performance gains here that are worthwhile. FWIW, last I checked[0], Polars still smokes Pandas in basically every way.
I’ve moved entirely to Polars (which is essentially Pandas written in Rust with new design decisions) with DuckDB as my SQL query engine. Since both are backed by Arrow, there is zero copy and performance on large datasets is super fast (due to vectorization, not just parallelization)
I keep Pandas around for quick plots and legacy code. I will always be grateful for Pandas because there truly was no good dataframe library during its time. It has enabled an entire generation of data scientists to do what they do and built a foundation — a foundation which Polars and DuckDB are now building on and have surpassed.
How well does Polars play with many of the other standard data tools in Python (scikit learn, etc.)? Do the performance gains carry over?
It works as well as Pandas (realize that scikit actually doesn’t support Pandas — you have to cast a dataframe into a Numpy array first)
I generally work with with Polars and DuckDB until the final step, when I cast it into a data structure I need (Pandas dataframe, Parquet etc)
All the expensive intermediate operations are taken care of in Polars and DuckDB.
Also a Polars dataframe — although it has different semantics — behaves like a Pandas dataframe for the most part. I haven’t had much trouble moving between it and Pandas.
You do not have to cast pandas DataFrames when using scikit-learn, for many years already. Additional in recent version there has been increasing support for also returning DataFrames, at least with transformers and checking column names/order.
Yes that support is still not complete. When you pass a Pandas dataframe into Scikit you are implicitly doing df.values which loses all the dataframe metadata.
There is a library called sklearn-pandas which doesn’t seem to be mainstream and dev has stopped since 2022.
From pandas-dataclasses #166 "ENH: pyarrow and optionally pydantic" https://github.com/astropenguin/pandas-dataclasses/issues/16... :
> What should be the API for working with pandas, pyarrow, and dataclasses and/or pydantic?
> Pandas 2.0 supports pyarrow for so many things now, and pydantic does data validation with a drop-in dataclasses.dataclass replacement at pydantic.dataclasses.dataclass.
Model output may or may not converge given the enumeration ordering of Categorical CSVW columns, for example; so consistent round-trip (Linked Data) schema tool support would be essential.
CuML is scikit-learn API compatible and can use Dask for distributed and/or multi-GPU workloads. CuML is built on CuDF and CuPY; CuPy is a replacement for NumPy arrays on GPUs with 100x relative performance.
CuPy: https://github.com/cupy/cupy :
> CuPy is a NumPy/SciPy-compatible array library for GPU-accelerated computing with Python. CuPy acts as a drop-in replacement to run existing NumPy/SciPy code on NVIDIA CUDA or AMD ROCm platforms.
> CuPy is an open-source array library for GPU-accelerated computing with Python. CuPy utilizes CUDA Toolkit libraries including cuBLAS, cuRAND, cuSOLVER, cuSPARSE, cuFFT, cuDNN and NCCL to make full use of the GPU architecture.
> The figure shows CuPy speedup over NumPy. Most operations perform well on a GPU using CuPy out of the box. CuPy speeds up some operations more than 100X. Read the original benchmark article Single-GPU CuPy Speedups on the RAPIDS AI Medium blog
CuDF: https://github.com/rapidsai/cudf
CuML: https://github.com/rapidsai/cuml :
> cuML is a suite of libraries that implement machine learning algorithms and mathematical primitives functions that share compatible APIs with other RAPIDS projects.*
> cuML enables data scientists, researchers, and software engineers to run traditional tabular ML tasks on GPUs without going into the details of CUDA programming. In most cases, cuML's Python API matches the API from scikit-learn.
> For large datasets, these GPU-based implementations can complete 10-50x faster than their CPU equivalents. For details on performance, see the cuML Benchmarks Notebook.
FWICS there's now a ROCm version of CuPy, so it says CUDA (NVIDIA only) but also compiles for AMD. IDK whether there are plans to support Intel OneAPI, too.
What of the non-Arrow parts of other pandas-compatible and not pandas-compatible DataFrame libraries can be ported back to Pandas (and R)?
RFdiffusion: Diffusion model generates protein backbones
So I guess this means easier drug discovery? Honesty those wiggly diagrams are meaningless to me I have no bio background
Easier drug discovery is what they tell public and grant agencies. In a roundabout way it’s true. Maybe. Many other hurdles still exist. But what this and other similar tools really are, is significantly advancing basic science in creating our own protein designs.
Before alphafold changed this field, creating your own protein design was considered an insane task (not impossible, bakers lab and others have done it a couple times). But these tools (now we have multiple) allow you to create new proteins From scratch that can do exactly what you want (caveats galore). New enzymes that can catalyze reactions never found in nature for example.
Before this all we could do was take proteins that already exist in nature and modify them. So you can imagine how new this world is.
Large Language models can also generate novel and working protein structures that adhere to a specified purpose https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2
Can optical tweezers construct such proteins; or is there a more efficient way?
Optical tweezers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers
"'Impossible' photonic breakthrough: scientist manipulate light at subwavelength scale" https://thedebrief.org/impossible-photonic-breakthrough-scie... :
> have successfully demonstrated that a beam of light can not only be confined to a spot that is 50 times smaller than its own wavelength but also “in a first of its kind” the spot can be moved by minuscule amounts at the point where the light is confined.
> According to that research, the key to confining light below the previous impermeable Abbe diffraction limit was accomplished by “storing a part of the electromagnetic energy in the kinetic energy of electric charges.” This clever adaptation, the researchers wrote, “opened the door to a number of groundbreaking real-world applications, which has contributed to the great success of the field of nanophotonics.”
> “Looking to the future, in principle, it could lead to the manipulation of micro and nanometre-sized objects, including biological particles,” De Liberato says, “or perhaps the sizeable enhancement of the sensitivity resolution of microscopic sensors.”
"Digging into DNA Repair with Optical Tweezer Technology" https://www.genengnews.com/topics/digging-into-dna-repair-wi...
It's much easier than that! Living cells already have ribosomes that construct proteins and all the other molecular machinery needed to go from DNA sequence to assembled protein. You can order a DNA sequence online and put it into e-coli or yeast cells and those cells will make that protein for you.
TIL about mail-order CRISPR kits. "Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA" (2017) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mail-order-crispr...
Protein production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_production
Tissue Nanotransfection reprograms e.g. fibroblasts into neurons and endothelial cells (for ischemia) using electric charge. Are there different proteins then expressed? Which are the really useful targets?
> The delivered cargo then transforms the affected cells into a desired cell type without first transforming them to stem cells. TNT is a novel technique and has been used on mice models to successfully transfect fibroblasts into neuron-like cells along with rescue of ischemia in mice models with induced vasculature and perfusion
> [...] This chip is then connected to an electrical source capable of delivering an electrical field to drive the factors from the reservoir into the nanochannels, and onto the contacted tissue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection#Techni...
Are there lab safety standards for handling yeast or worse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive
"Bacterial ‘Nanosyringe’ Could Deliver Gene Therapy to Human Cells" (2023) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bacterial-nanosyr... :
> In a paper published today in Nature, researchers report refashioning Photorhabdus’s syringe—called a contractile injection system—so that it can attach to human cells and inject large proteins into them. The work could provide a way to deliver various therapeutic proteins into any type of cell, including proteins that can “edit” the cell’s DNA. “It’s a very interesting approach,” says Mark Kay, a gene therapy researcher at Stanford University who was not involved in the study. “Where I think it could be very useful is when you want to express proteins that can do genome editing” to correct or knock out a gene that is mutated in a genetic disorder, he says.
> The nano injector could provide a critical tool for scientists interested in tweaking genes. “Delivery is probably the biggest unsolved problem for gene editing,” says study investigator Feng Zhang, a molecular biologist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. Zhang is known for his work developing the gene editing system CRISPR-Cas9. Existing technology can insert the editing machinery “into a few tissues, blood and liver and the eye, but we don’t have a good way to get to anywhere else,” such as the brain, heart, lung or kidney, Zhang says. The syringe technology also holds promise for treating cancer because it can be engineered to attach to receptors on certain cancer cells.
From "New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34715188 :
> "I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice"
>> First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is merely a single-cell organism [1].
Which proteins code for organisms that compute?
Llama.cpp 30B runs with only 6GB of RAM now
Author here. For additional context, please read https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/638#discu... The loading time performance has been a huge win for usability, and folks have been having the most wonderful reactions after using this change. But we don't have a compelling enough theory yet to explain the RAM usage miracle. So please don't get too excited just yet! Yes things are getting more awesome, but like all things in science a small amount of healthy skepticism is warranted.
Didn't expect to see two titans today: ggerganov AND jart. Can ya'll slow down you make us mortals look bad :')
Seeing such clever use of mmap makes me dread to imagine how much Python spaghetti probably tanks OpenAI's and other "big ML" shops' infra when they should've trusted in zero copy solutions.
Perhaps SWE is dead after all, but LLMs didn't kill it...
You can mmap from python.
The CPython mmap module docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/mmap.html
zero_buffer (CFFI, 2013) https://github.com/alex/zero_buffer/blob/master/zero_buffer....
"Buffers on the edge: Python and Rust" (2022) https://alexgaynor.net/2022/oct/23/buffers-on-the-edge/ :
> If you have a Python object and want to obtain its buffer, you can do so with memoryview in Python or PyObject_GetBuffer in C. If you’re defining a class and want to expose a buffer, you can do so in Python by… actually you can’t, only classes implemented in C can implement the buffer protocol. To implement the buffer protocol in C, you provide the bf_getbuffer and bf_releasebuffer functions which are called to obtain a buffer from an object and when that buffer is being released, respectively.
iocursor (CPython C API, ~Rust std::io::Cursor) https://github.com/althonos/iocursor
Arrow Python (C++) > On disk and MemoryMappedFile s: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/memory.html#on-disk-and...
"Apache Arrow: Read DataFrame With Zero Memory" (2020) https://towardsdatascience.com/apache-arrow-read-dataframe-w...
pyarrow.Tensor: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/generated/pyarrow.Tenso...
ONNX is built on protocolbuffers/protobufs (google/protobufs), while Arrow is built on google/flatbuffers.
FlatBuffers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlatBuffers :
> It supports “zero-copy” deserialization, so that accessing the serialized data does not require first copying it into a separate part of memory. This makes accessing data in these formats much faster than data in formats requiring more extensive processing, such as JSON, CSV, and in many cases Protocol Buffers. Compared to other serialization formats however, the handling of FlatBuffers requires usually more code, and some operations are not possible (like some mutation operations).
We updated our RSA SSH host key
The fact that this key was apparently not stored in an HSM, and that GH employees had access to this private key (allowing them to accidentally push it) means that effectively all communication with GH since the founding of the company has to be considered compromised. This basically means that, depending on your level of paranoia, you will have to review all code that has ever interacted with Github repositories, and any code pushed or pulled from private repositories can no longer be considered private.
Github's customers trust GH/MS with their code, which, for most businesses, is a high value asset. It wouldn't surprise me if this all results in a massive lawsuit. Not just against GH as a company, but also to those involved (like the CISO). Also, how on earth was it never discovered during an audit that the SSH private key was plain text and accessible? How has GH ever been able to become ISO certified last year [0], when they didn't even place their keys in a HSM?
Obviously, as a paying customer I am quite angry with GH right now. So I might be overreacting when I write this, but IMO the responsible persons (not talking about the poor dev that pushed the key, but the managers, CISO, auditors, etc.) should be fined, and/or lose their license.
[0] https://github.blog/2022-05-16-github-achieves-iso-iec-27001...
SSH uses ephemeral keys. It's not enough to have the private key and listen to the bytes on the wire, you have to actively MITM the connection. A github employee who has access to the private key and enough network admin privileges to MITM your connection already has access to the disk platters your data is saved on.
Regarding the secrecy of the data you host at github, you should operate under the assumption that a sizeable number of github employees will have access to it. You should assume that it's all sitting unencrypted on several different disk platters replicated at several different geographically separated locations. Because it is.
One of the things that you give up when you host your private data on the cloud is controlling who and under what circumstances people can view or modify your private data. If the content of the data is enough to sink you/your company without remedy you should not store it on the cloud.
I would also add that your ability to pretend to be the client to the server is also limited, if ssh key based client authentication is used. This means that even if the host key is leaked, an attacker will not be able to push in the name of the attacked client. The attacker will be able to pretend to be the server to the client, and thus be able to get the pushed code from the client (even if the client just added one patch, the attacker can pretend to be an empty repo server side and receive the entire repo.
If ssh token based auth is used, it's different of course, because then the server gets access to the token. Ideally Github would invalidate all their auth tokens as well.
The fun fact is that a token compromise (or any other attack) can still happen any point in the future with devices that still have outdated ssh keys. That's a bit unfortunate as no revocation mechanism exists for ssh keys... ideally clients would blacklist the ssh key, given the huge importance of github.
WKD also lacks key revocation and CT Certificate Transparency.
E.g. keybase could do X.509 like Certificate Transparency.
:
$ keybase pgp -h
NAME:
keybase pgp - Manage keybase PGP keys
USAGE:
keybase pgp <command> [arguments...]
COMMANDS:
gen Generate a new PGP key and write to local secret keychain
pull Download the latest PGP keys for people you follow.
update Update your public PGP keys on keybase with those exported from the local GPG keyring
select Select a key from GnuPG as your own and register the public half with Keybase
sign PGP sign a document.
encrypt PGP encrypt messages or files for keybase users
decrypt PGP decrypt messages or files for keybase users
verify PGP verify message or file signatures for keybase users
export Export a PGP key from keybase
import Import a PGP key into keybase
drop Drop Keybase's use of a PGP key
list List the active PGP keys in your account.
purge Purge all PGP keys from Keybase keyring
push-private Export PGP keys from GnuPG keychain, and write them to KBFS.
pull-private Export PGP from KBFS and write them to the GnuPG keychain
help, h Shows a list of commands or help for one command
$ keybase pgp drop -h
NAME:
keybase pgp drop - Drop Keybase's use of a PGP key
USAGE:
keybase pgp drop <key-id>
DESCRIPTION:
"keybase pgp drop" signs a statement saying the given PGP
key should no longer be associated with this account. It will **not** sign a PGP-style
revocation cert for this key; you'll have to do that on your own.
- "Revoked a PGP key, is there any way to get a revocation certificate now?" https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/2963
- "Overview of Certification Systems: X.509, CA, PGP and SKIP"
...
- k8s docker vault secrets [owasp, inurl:awesome] https://www.google.com/search?q=k8s+docker+vault+secrets+owa... https://github.com/gites/awesome-vault-tools
- Why secrets shouldn't be passed in $ENVIRONMENT variables; though e.g. the "12 Factor App" pattern advises to parametrize applications mostly with environment variables that show in /proc/pid/environ but not /proc/pid/cmdline
W3C DID supports GPG proofs and revocation IIRC:
"9.6 Key and Signature Expiration" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#key-and-signature-expiration
"9.8 Verification Method Revocation" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#verification-method-revocati...
Blockerts is built upon W3C DID and W3C Verified Credentials, W3C Linked Data Signatures, and Merkel trees (and JSON-LD). From the Blockerts FAQ https://www.blockcerts.org/guide/faq.html :
> How are certificates revoked?
> Even though certificates can be issued to a cohort of people, the issuer can still revoke from a single recipient. The Blockcerts standard supports a range of revocation techniques. Currently, the primary factor influencing the choice of revocation technique is the particular schema used.
> The Open Badges specification allows a HTTP URI revocation list. Each id field in the revokedAssertions array should match the assertion.id field in the certificate to revoke.
Re: CT and W3C VC Verifiable Credentials (and DNS record types for cert/pubkey hashes that must also be revoked; DoH/DoT + DNSSEC; EDNS): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32753994 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-32753994
"Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0: Securing the Integrity of Verifiable Credential Data" (Working Draft March 2023) > Security Considerations https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-integrity/#security-considerat...
If a system does not have key revocation it cannot be sufficiently secured.
Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?
As a developer, I recently encountered challenges with GRUB and discovered I lacked knowledge about my computer's boot process. I realized terms like EFI partition, MBR, GRUB, and Bootloader were unfamiliar to me and many of my colleagues. I'm seeking introductory and easy-to-understand resources to learn about these concepts. Any recommendations would be appreciated!
Booting process of Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Linux
Booting process of Windows NT since Vista: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_...
UEFI > Secure Booting, Boot Stages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Boot_stages
The EFI system partition is conventionally /boot/efi on a Linux system; and there's a signed "shim loader" that GRUB launches, which JMP- launches the kernel+initrd after loading the initrd into RAM (a "RAM drive") and mounting it as the initial root filesystem /, which is pivot_root'd away from after the copy of /sbin/init (systemd) mounts the actual root fs and launches all the services according to the Systemd unit files in order according to a topological sort given their dependency edges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition
Runlevels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel
runlevel 5 is runlevel 3 (multi-user with networking) + GUI. On a gnome system, GDM is the GUI process that is launched. GDM launches the user's Gnome session upon successful login. `systemctl restart gdm` restarts the GDM Gnome Display Manager "greeter" login screen, which runs basically runs ~startx after `bash --login`. Systemd maps the numbered runlevels to groups of unit files to launch:
telinit 6 # reboot
telinit 3 # kill -15 GDM and all logged in *GUI* sessions
>The EFI system partition is conventionally /boot/efi on a Linux system;
Still often mounted as /boot/efi but physically residing on the root of the hidden ESP volume as EFI/boot & EFI/ubuntu, for distros like ubuntu.
So when mounted you have something like /boot/efi/boot/bootx64.efi and boot/efi/ubuntu/grub etc. if visible and accessible.
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Show HN: PicoVGA Library – VGA/TV Display on Raspberry Pi Pico
TV/VGA + Serial Console on an RP2040 would be cool.
- rs232
- UART
- USB-TTL w/ configurable (3.3v/5v) voltage levels
- (optional) VGA output
- (optional) WiFi/Bluetooth (RP2040W Pi Pico W)
The OpenWRT hardware/port.serial wiki page explains how to open a serial console with screen and a tty /dev; and about 3.3V/5V bricking a router and/or the cable: https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/port.serial#use_yo...
PiKVM may have console support but with a Pi 3/4+, not a $4/$6 RP2040 /W with or without low-level WiFi+Bluetooth
"Raspberry Pi Pico Serial Communication Example (MicroPython)" https://electrocredible.com/raspberry-pi-pico-serial-uart-mi...
> The RP2040 microcontroller in Raspberry Pi Pico has two UART peripherals, UART0 and UART1. The UART in RP2040 has the following features: [pinout]
The reason for this port is that I'm using PicoVGA as a VGA terminal for an 8bit retro computer. I'm using USB host mode on the Pico for keyboard and mouse input. I found a Pico W for sale for a reasonable price + shipping so now I can add wifi support.
Can it run a ~GNUscreen text console attached to a serial port attached to pins on the other side of the Pico, and maybe a BLE keyboard/controller? (And how, while I'm at it; Thonny has an AST parse tree menu item)
I don't see why not. Pico has a few dedicated UART pins. Bluetooth support is pretty new, though.
2023-02-10; bluekitchen/btstack: https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk/commit/c8ccefb9726b8...
> - RS232
RS232: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232
Serial Port: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_port
> - UART
UART: Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_asynchronous_receive...
> - USB-TTL w/ configurable (3.3v/5v) voltage levels
USB-to-serial adapter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-to-serial_adapter
> Most commonly the USB data signals are converted to either RS-232, RS-485, RS-422, or TTL-level UART serial data.
- SunFounder Thales Pi Pico Kit > Components > Slide Switch, Resistor, : https://docs.sunfounder.com/projects/thales-kit/en/latest/co... Kepler has the 2040W: https://docs.sunfounder.com/projects/kepler-kit/en/latest/
/? how to limit voltage to 3.3v: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+limit+voltage+to+3.3v
- Zener diode > Voltage shifter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zener_diode#Voltage_shifter
- Voltage regulator > DC voltage stabilizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage_regulator#DC_voltage_s...
- TIL electronics.stackexchange has CircuitLab built-in: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/241537/3-3v-... . Autodesk TinkerCAD is a neat, free, web-based circuit simulator, too; though it supports Arduino and bbc:micro but not (yet?) Pi Pico like Wokwi.
There is at least one RP2040 JS simulator:
Wokwi appears to support {MicroPython, CircuitPython,} on {Pi Pico} and also Rust on ESP32:
Wokwi > New Pi Pico project: https://wokwi.com/projects/new/pi-pico
Wokwi > New Pi Pico + MicroPython project: https://wokwi.com/projects/new/micropython-pi-pico
wokwi/rp2040js : https://github.com/wokwi/rp2040js
https://www.hackster.io/Hack-star-Arduino/raspberry-pi-pico-...
> - (optional) WiFi/Bluetooth (RP2040W Pi Pico W)
/? "pi pico" bluetooth 5.2 [BLE] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pi+pico%22+bluetooth+5.2 :
- From https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/02/11/raspberry-pi-pico-w-... :
>> The Raspberry Pi Pico W board was launched with a WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.2 module based on the Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip in June 2022
bluekitchen/btstack is the basis for the Bluetooth support i Pi Pico SDK 1.5.0+: https://github.com/bluekitchen/btstack
> MicroPython
awesome-micropython: https://github.com/mcauser/awesome-micropython
https://github.com/pfalcon/awesome-micropython :
- There is a web-based MicroPython REPL, and it only works over HTTP due to WebSockets WSS, so it's best to clone that file locally: http://micropython.org/webrepl/ https://github.com/micropython/webrepl/
awesome-circuitpython: https://github.com/adafruit/awesome-circuitpython
- microsoft/vscode-python-devicesimulator lacks maintainers and Pi Pico Support: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python-devicesimulator/w...
https://vscode.dev/ is the official hosted copy of VSCode as WASM in a browser tab. YMMV with which extensions work after compilation to WASM and without WASI (node/fs,) in a browser tab.
From "MicroPython officially becomes part of the Arduino ecosystem" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33699666 :
> [in addition to the Arduino IDE support for Pi Pico now] For VSCode, there are a number of extensions for CircuitPython and MicroPython:
> joedevivo.vscode-circuitpython: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=joedeviv...
> Pymakr https://github.com/pycom/pymakr-vsc/blob/next/GET_STARTED.md
> Pico-Go: https://github.com/cpwood/Pico-Go
https://scratch.mit.edu/ has bbc:microbit (and LEGO Boost) extensions when you click plus at the lower left; but not (yet?) Pi Pico support: https://github.com/LLK https://github.com/LLK/scratch-gui/commit/421d673e714a367ff2... https://github.com/microbit-more/mbit-more-v2
FDIC – SVB FAQ
> The FDIC will pay uninsured depositors an advance dividend within the next week.
Depending on the amount, this can possibly make things a lot better for the startups banking there.
Where does the money come from? I mean that non-sarcastically, confess I've not figured out the way the banking system in the large works.
edit : thanks all for coherent clear responses.
A lot of SVB's assets can be sold immediately in robust markets (e.g. treasuries)
If that was true the bank wouldn't be insolvent.
And yet: https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2023/03/DFP...
If you have $160B in deposits but only $150B in liquid assets, you're still insolvent. Doesn't mean the assets aren't liquid.
You are only insolvent if you have $160B in withdrawals. If the deposits sat until the bonds matured, the $150B in currently liquid assets would be worth more than $150B.
How would the strict separation between savings deposits and investment banking from Glass-Steagull (1933) (which was repealed by GLBA in 1999) banking regulations have prevented this?
From "1999 Repeal of Glass-Steagall was the worst deregulation enacted in US history" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30206570 :
> Yeah what was the deal with that dotcom correction in the early 2000s? Did banks invest differently after GLBA said that they can gamble against peoples' savings deposits (because they created a 'sociallist' $100b credit line, called it FDIC, and things like that don't happen anymore)
> Decline of the Glass-Steagall Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Glass%E2%80%93S...
> Dot-com bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
An Update on USDC and Silicon Valley Bank
23% of the reserve, or $9.7B is held in cash.
I think on Thursday, SVB saw cash outflow requests over $40b in one day. USDC peg is so far below 1 right now there will definitely be a lot of par arbitrage Monday trying to withdraw.
Hopefully it doesn’t take longer than a day for them to settle treasury trades, and maybe some people have lost the keys to their crypto. They could also possibly have a line of credit with instant settlement assuming they’re truly solvent with marketable securities at market prices.
3 month (or less) Treasury Bills are damn close to cash. I don't believe they lose value in practice, not even in the rapidly raising interest rate environment of the last year.
The problem at Silvergate and Silicon Valley Banks is that they bought 10 year or 30 year bonds, not 3 month bills. Its a completely different composition, with completely different properties.
Why lock up the money for so long in such an unstable time as this? Better interest rates?
> Better interest rates?
You betcha.
Here's the rates for March 2021. 3M would have gotten you 0.05% APY, while 10Y gets you 1.45% APY.
https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...
Yeah, it sounded like a perfect plan if no customers wanted to get their funds within the next 10 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No that's not it. You can sell the bonds any time. But now they're worth considerably less because interest rates are much higher now. They locked themselves in at rate that are now terrible for 10 years.
So weird to think that near-zero interest rates are the best you can do for the next 10 years. I'm pretty sure everyone way saying "lock in this low interest rate before they go up again!"
On Treasuries over what windowed series? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=treasury%3Byield+c...
Is this the one?
"10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Minus 3-Month Treasury Constant Maturity" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y3M
Urgent: Sign the petition now
Trump & republicans cut banking regulations and increased capital thresholds from 50 to 250 billion for banks to comply with an FDIC stress test as mandated by Dodd-Frank (which was enacted after the mortgage crisis). SVB would have not gone bankrupt had they been required to pass this stresstest. This change was widely supported by tech companies and banks and here we are again with a bank engaging in risky behavior holding out their hand for taxpayers to bail them out: NO.
Stress test (financial) > Bank stress test , Payment and settlement systems stress test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_test_(financial)#Bank_s...
List of bank stress tests > Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_stress_tests#Amer...
https://www.google.com/search?q=increased+capital+thresholds...
From "Transparency & Accountability - EGRRCPA (S. 2155) Rulemakings" https://www.fdic.gov/transparency/egrrcpa.html :
> The FDIC is responsible for a number of rulemakings under the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (EGRRCPA). This page provides links to proposed and final rules and related documents.
"FDIC Releases Economic Scenarios for 2022 Stress Testing" (2022) https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2022/pr22019.html
How can the scenarios and policies be improved?
129-year-old vessel still tethered to lifeboat found on floor of Lake Huron
I'd love to dive there someday.
The NOAA page on the wreck (https://thunderbay.noaa.gov/shipwrecks/ironton.html) just has depth listed as "TBA", but the Ohio that it collided with is in >100m.
assuming it's in similar range, that's serious depth. Way into hypoxic trimix zone (ie: you'll be breathing gas that'd kill you if you were breathing it on the surface)
Looks fascinating, but almost certainly out of reach for all but the most extreme technical divers.
Crazy how 100m is such a short distance in most walks of life except for underwater.
It’s seriously non intuitive to a layman the whole pressure thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness#Ascent_... :
> DCS [Decompression Sickness] is best known as a diving disorder that affects divers having breathed gas that is at a higher pressure than the surface pressure, owing to the pressure of the surrounding water. The risk of DCS increases when diving for extended periods or at greater depth, without ascending gradually and making the decompression stops needed to slowly reduce the excess pressure of inert gases dissolved in the body.
DCS > Prevention > Underwater diving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness#Underwa... :
> Decompression time can be significantly shortened by breathing mixtures containing much less inert gas during the decompression phase of the dive (or pure oxygen at stops in 6 metres (20 ft) of water or less). The reason is that the inert gas outgases at a rate proportional to the difference between the partial pressure of inert gas in the diver's body and its partial pressure in the breathing gas; whereas the likelihood of bubble formation depends on the difference between the inert gas partial pressure in the diver's body and the ambient pressure. Reduction in decompression requirements can also be gained by breathing a nitrox mix during the dive, since less nitrogen will be taken into the body than during the same dive done on air. [85]
Google Groups has been left to die
Google Groups has survived 22 years. How many self-hosted Discourse forums can say the same? If you're working on a new, small side-project like a new formal evaluator, are you going to want to spend your limited administrative bandwidth onboarding new contributors, responding to feature suggestions, talking to users, etc, or are you going to want to spend it trying to wrangle self-hosted forum administration and figure out email delivery? the article has a one-line tossed off aside at the end to say "Certainly self-hosted FOSS communities can die, but these are functions of community activity itself rather than the service they’re hosted on", but without considering that the absolute most crucial time for community resources to survive is through periods of lackluster or nonexistent community involvement. If you have a Google Group full of, say, formal methods programming experts, then it can spend 5 years fallow and still be chock-full of absolutely vital historical resources and even spring back into life as people start using it again for discussion. That sort of longevity just can't exist if someone stopped paying the hosting bills for their self-hosted TLA discourse forum 3 years in.
AtariAge.com[1] - first created in 1988, or 25 years ago. Run by some bloke on the internet.
The problem for Google Groups is that no-one can perf-farm it any more, which is the sole reason for projects to survive at Google...
perf-farm ? I think I might know what you mean, but could you unpack?
Not the person who used the term, but I kind of wish I had been. It's excellent. At FAANG-ish companies where "impact" is the key to promotion, there's an inevitable tendency for engineers to prefer working on things that are highly visible like starting new projects or adding new features, vs. things that are highly useful like stability, testing, or code quality. Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others when they've served their perf-review-enhancing purpose. "Perf farming" is as good a term as I've seen for it.
> Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others
Well, Jeff and Sanjay got to DE/Fellows this way, so this is a good role model. Unfortunately doesn’t scale.
Zero energy ready homes are coming
Contrary to what I am seeing in comments on HN, this is not just for single family detached housing. If you go to the ZERH website, under Program Requirements it says:
Versions 1 and 2, Single Family, Multifamily, and Manufactured Homes
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home...
Additionally, one of the photos in the featured article has the following caption:
Lopez Community Land Trust built this 561-square-foot affordable home on Lopez Island, Washington, to the high-performance criteria of DOE's Zero Energy Ready Home program that delivers a $20-per-month average monthly energy bill.
I've said for years we need to go back to more passive solar design as our baseline standard because it is both more energy efficient and more comfortable for humans. It protects the environment while improving quality of life.
It's a myth that you can't see gains in both areas.
I'm also happy to see the caption because we need to do a better job of supporting high quality of life in small towns, not just big cities. Trends in recent decades mean small towns suck because they lack services and big cities suck if you aren't one of the wealthy.
That wasn't always true and programs like this can improve and strengthen both small town and urban environments while mitigating the burden suburbs currently represent.
Passive solar building design : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design#...
Low-energy house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_house
List of low-energy building techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-energy_building_te...
/? Passive solar home (tbm=isch image search) https://www.google.com/search?q=passive+solar+home&tbm=isch
/? Passive solar house: https://youtube.com/results?search_query=passive+solar+house
/? passive solar house: https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=passive%20solar%20h...
(Edit)
Maximum solar energy is on the equatorial side of the house.
Full-sun plants prefer maximum solar energy.
10ft (3m) underground it's about 75°F (24°C) all year. Geothermal systems leverage this. (Passive) Walipini greenhouses are partially or fully underground or in a hillside, but must also manage groundwater seepage and flooding; e.g. with a DC solar sump pump and/or drainage channels filled with rock.
Passive solar greenhouses (especially in China and now Canada) have a natural or mounded earthen wall thermal mass on one side, and they lower wool blankets over the upside-down wing airfoil -like transparent side at night and when it's too warm (with a ~4HP motor).
TIL an aquarium heater can heat a tank of water working as a thermal mass in a geodesic growing dome; which can be partially-buried or half-walled with preformed hempcrete block.
Round structures are typically more resilient to wind:
Shear stress > Beam shear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shear_stress
Deformation (physics) > Strain > Shear strain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformation_(physics)#Shear_st...
GH topic: finite-element-analysis https://github.com/topics/finite-element-analysis
GH topic: structural-analysis: https://github.com/topics/structural-engineering https://github.com/topics/structural-analysis
What open source software is there for passive home design and zero-energy home design?
Round house: https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=round%20house
The shearing force due to wind on structures with corners (and passive rooflines) causes racking and compromise of structural integrity; round homes apparently fare best in hurricanes.
Walipini passive solar green houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walipini
Earthship passive solar homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
Underground living: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_living
Root cellar passive refrigeration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cellar
Ground source heat pump (Geothermal heat pump) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
Solar-assisted heat pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-assisted_heat_pump
(Geothermal Power = Geothermal Electricity) != (Geothermal Heating)
Geothermal power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
Geothermal Heating is so old, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating
...
AC-to-DC (rectifier; GaNprime, GaN) and DC-to-AC (inverter) are inefficient conversions: it wastes electricity as heat.
Residential and Commercial AC electrical systems have a GFCI ground loop (for the ground pin on standard AC adapters)
WAV: Watts = Amps * Volts
# USB power specs (DC)
7.5w = 1.5amp * 5volts # USB
15w = 3a * 5v # USB-C
100w = 5a * 20v # USB-C PD
240w = 5a * 48v # USB-C PD 3.1
# 110v/120v AC: 15amp; Standard Residential AC in North America:
1500w = 15a * 100v # Microwave oven
1650w = 15a * 110v
1440w = 12a * 120v # AC EV charger
# 110/120 AC: 20amp
2400w = 20a * 120v # Level 1 EV charger
# 240v AC plug: Dryer, Oven, Stove, EV
4800w = 20a * 240v
7200w = 30a * 240v # Public charging station
9600w = 40a * 240v # Level 2 EV charget
14400w = 60a * 240v
120000w = 300a * 400v # Supercharger v2
120kW = 300a * 400v
1000000w = 1000a * 1000v # Megacharger
1000kW = 1000a * 1000v
1MW = 1000a * 1000v
Charging station > Charging time > charger specs table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_station#Charging_time
(Trifuel) generators do not have catalytic converters.
Wood stoves must be sufficiently efficient; and can be made so with a catalytic combustor or a returning apparatus (and/or thermoelectrics to convert heat to electricity).
/? Catalytic combustor (wood stove) https://www.google.com/search?q=%22catalytic+combustor%22
Wood-burning stove > Safety and pollution considerations > US pollution control requirements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#US_pollutio...
Gravitational potential energy is less lossy than CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage is less lossy than thermal salt is less lossy than chemical batteries.
'Pain mound' low tech compost driven water heaters are neat too
This is a pile of vaguely relevant facts...
I think in my HN comments I'd prefer a couple of facts and a conclusion, with citations for more detail.
Stochastic gradient descent written in SQL
Title here is wrong. Title in article and headings in article are right: ONLINE gradient descent
It's specifically not stochastic. From the article:
Online gradient descent
Finally, we have enough experience to implement online gradient descent. To keep things simple, we will use a very vanilla version:
- Constant learning rate, as opposed to a schedule.
- Single epoch, we only do one pass on the data.
- Not stochastic: the rows are not shuffled. ⇠ ⇠ ⇠ ⇠
- Squared loss, which is the standard loss for regression.
- No gradient clipping.
- No weight regularisation.
- No intercept term.
Hehe I was wondering if someone would catch that. Rest assured, I know the difference between online and stochastic gradient descent. I admit I used stochastic on Hacker News because I thought it would generate more engagement.
What are some adversarial cases for gradient descent, and/or what sort of e.g. DVC.org or W3C PROV provenance information should be tracked for a production ML workflow?
Gradient descent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent
Stochastic gradient descent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_gradient_descent
Online machine learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_machine_learning
adversarial gradient descent site:github.com inurl:awesome : https://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+adversarial+gradient...
https://github.com/EthicalML/awesome-production-machine-lear...
Robust machine learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_(computer_science)#...
Robust gradient descent
We built model & data provenance into our open source ML library, though it's admittedly not the W3C PROV standard. There were a few gaps in it until we built an automated reproducibility system on top of it, but now it's pretty solid for all the algorithms we implement. Unfortunately some of the things we wrap (notably TensorFlow) aren't reproducible enough due to some unfixed bugs. There's an overview of the provenance system in this reprise of the JavaOne talk I gave here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOMjq2OS_c. The library is on GitHub - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.
U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds
As others mentioned, this is not a new finding. There is a lot of academic and industrial/economic analysis on this subject. Ethanol from corn was never a good idea economically for anyone other than corn farmers. It is also bad environmentally and places additional competitive demand on our food supply (choice and competition between corn going into food or fuel supply).
Similar analysis has been done on other crop feed-stocks (switch grass, etc.) and none of the analysis has shown that crop derived ethanol is a good idea.
I'm not a leading expert on this subject by any means, but I am a PhD chemical engineer and did a lot of research into alternative fuels science and economics about ten years ago. I'm not up on the latest research and analysis but the fundamental thermodynamics and carbon cycles of crop-based ethanol have not changed much in the past ten years or so.
Corn farmers from Iowa. Where they hold the first caucus of the interminable election season.
No American politician or political party can afford to offend corn farmers. We should count ourselves lucky that our gasoline is only 10% corn.
Can Ethanol be sustainably produced from corn?
Which other crops have sufficient margin given commodity prices?
Can solar and goats and wind and IDK algae+co2 make up the difference?
Is solar laser weeding a more sustainable approach?
What rotations improve the compost and soil situation?
> Can solar and goats and wind and IDK algae+co2 make up the difference?
Can row covers etc be made from corn; from cellulose and what other sustainable inputs (ideally that are waste outputs)?
Compostable thermoformable biopolymers for food packaging
FWIU transparent wood "windows" are made out of treated cellulose? How do they compare with glass and plastic in terms of transparency for full spectrum UV for e.g. plant growth, sanitization, and vitamin D?
> Is solar laser weeding a more sustainable approach?
From "Solar-Powered Plant Protection Equipment: Perspective and Prospects" (2022) https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/19/7379 :
>> The unmanned system (robot) is well suited for weeding operations, and it helps to minimize the required workforce and herbicide usage while weeding. Two solar-powered weeders, EcoRobot and AVO robot models, are developed by Ecorobotix, Switzerland (Figure 2). These models work more effectively in row crops based on the detection of weeds (>85%), and a herbicides is applied precisely on the weeds to destroy them. The solar power used in EcoRobot and AVO models is 380 W and 1150 W, respectively, and they have a working time of 8 and 12 h once fully charged by solar panels [64].
> What rotations improve the compost and soil situation?
Crop rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
SymPy makes math fun again
I like sagemath. They have integration with sympy, and they also have many features making python simpler when you want to do mathematical things.
There's latex display feature when in notebook. It looks good, can even have symbolical matrices and display them as you would've expected.
It's on par with Wolfram notebook, but you get to program in python instead of some propietary language.
If you got some really long formula, it's easier to see you got it correctly by displaying it symbolically in latex.
They have other things to smooth out the parts of python which are annoying in math, like exponentiation works with ^, and dividing integers returns a rational number instead of floating point or an integer.
> They have other things to smooth out the parts of python which are annoying in math, like exponentiation works with ^, and dividing integers returns a rational number instead of floating point or an integer.
SageMath also has a multivariate inequality solver IIRC. `*` is repeated multiplication (exponentiation) in Python. If you require preprocessing to translate ^ to *, you don't have valid Python code that'll run with any other interpreter.
Is it easier to import SageMath from a plain Python script now; with conda repackaging?
Type promotion in Python:
from rational import Rational
assert Rational(1, 4) / 2 == Rational(1, 8)
from __future__ import division
assert 3 / 2 == 1.5
assert 3 // 2 == 1
assert 4 / 2 == 2.0
assert 3 / 2 == 1.5
assert 3.0 / 2 == 1.5
assert 3 // 2 == 1
assert 4 / 2 == 2.0> Is it easier to import SageMath from a plain Python script now; with conda repackaging?
Yes, it's easy. It was always possible, since fortunately none of the Sage library implementation uses the Sage preprocessor. You could always do "sage -python" and you get the Python interpreter that Sage uses, and can import Sage via "import sage.all". Somebody asked me exactly this question at a colloquium talk I gave on Sage yesterday, and here's my answer/demo:
https://youtu.be/dy792FEh1ns?t=1140
In the demo, I use a Jupyter kernel that runs the Python included in Sage-9.8.
Disclaimer: I created the Sage preparser long ago, in order to make Sage more palatable to mathematicians. In particular, it was inspired by audience feedback during a live demo I did at PyCon 2005.
> They have other things to smooth out the parts of python
I should add that this is an interesting chunk of Python code, and we've always planned to separate it out from Sage as a separate library than could be used with Sympy, etc.
https://github.com/sagemath/sage/blob/52a81cbd161ef4d5895325...
It does a surprising number of little clever things we realized would be a good idea over years, and it has some neat ideas from various Python PEP's like [1..10] that were rejected from Python, but are very useful when expressing mathematics. It's also annoying when you just want to format your code using prettier (say), and you can't because Sage isn't Python. :-(
Recently I've been working with the %%ipytest magic command for running pytest in notebooks.
Is there a %%sage IPython magic method that passes code through the preparse.py input transform?
Please tell us what features you’d like in news.ycombinator (2007)
Client-side encryption for Gmail in Google Workspace is now generally available
Not available to users with personal Google Accounts.
Why not?
I’m speculating about how this works, but it probably doesn’t make sense for general-purpose email.
For emails between members of one workspace/domain, you can conceptually perform key exchange to implement client-side encryption. You also don’t have spam concerns within members of a workspace.
There’s no general way to do key exchange between different email domains, and you do have spam concerns (which to address requires scanning the content).
There’s no protocol for doing such things over different email domains in a way that’s compatible and interoperable across software stacks. This technology is proprietary, and would make spam challenging to deal with (which again is not a problem within one workspace).
It’s also not clear to me whether this is really client-side encryption, so much as encryption at a layer higher than the email stack. (It’s pretty hard to do client-side encryption in the browser, in a way that matches user expectations. How do you store/retrieve the encryption key?)
OoenPGP.js is open source and developed by ProtonMail https://openpgpjs.org/ https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs
A number of Chrome (and I think also Firefox) extensions include their own local copy of OpenPGP.js for use with various webmail services, including GMail.
WKD (and HKP) depends upon HTTPS without cert pinning, FWIU: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD
How does an email client use WKD?
1. A user selects a recipient for an email.
2. The email client uses the domain part of the email address to construct which server to ask.
3. HTTPS is used to get the current public key.
The email client is ready to encrypt and send now.
An example:
https://intevation.de/.well-known/openpgpkey/hu/it5sewh54rxz33fwmr8u6dy4bbz8itz4 is the direct method URL for "bernhard.reiter@intevation.deHow/where exactly does it store the user's private keys?
The initial reaction that I have to client-side encryption with a web browser is: how does the client fetch/obtain the encryption key? (For signing outbound messages, or decrypting/verifying inbound.) Local storage wouldn't be appropriate as the sole storage for something like an asymmetric keypair, and it wouldn't provide the behavior that users expect: being able to log in and use a service from any web browser.
No one interacts with a web browser in such a way that it would be appropriate for the browser's local state to be the sole storage of something important like a private key. So this necessitates a service that the client interacts with during login to fetch its private key.
If you can log in with a browser, then that implies that you're fetching the key from somewhere. In the context of hosted Gmail, then that means that Gmail will be storing and providing your key. In which case it's nominally client-side encryption -- and the system that stores and provides your key might be totally separate from the email systems (and tightly controlled) -- but it's still not what I'd think of as client-side encryption generally. It's not really client-side encryption if the service that you're using to store data is the same service (from your perspective) as the one that stores/provides your key (those responsibilities might be separated from an implementation perspective, but they aren't from a user's perspective).
The service can employ various techniques like encrypting its copy of my private key using a symmetric key derived from my passphrase (and then discarded) -- and this decryption could perhaps be done client-side in the browser -- but ultimately the service still has the ability to obtain my key (at time of next login, if not any time).
If the service that provides a client-side encryption key could be divorced from a particular use-case -- e.g., if I could use my own pluggable key-providing service with Gmail, which my browser uses to fetch my key on login -- then the model would make a bit more sense. (You'd still have to trust a service like Gmail not to steal your key, but at least you don't have to trust it to store the key as well.)
Would it be possible to implement a standardized pluggable key server model? It seems plausible. Imagine that there was a standard HTTP protocol for this purpose, kind of like how WebAuthN is standardized. I log into Gmail, link it to my key server <https://keys.jcrites.example.com>, verify the connection, and then when logging into Gmail, then the web page is allowed to make HTTPS calls to <https://keys.jcrites.example.com> to either fetch my asymmetric key, or alternatively make calls to decrypt or encrypt specific content.
In the former case, it implements client-side encryption using a key server I control, while trusting Gmail not to misuse the key; in the latter case, it implements encryption using a keyserver that I control, and makes remote calls for each encryption operation. In that case Gmail would never have my key, although while browsing Gmail.com it could probably make arbitrary requests to the key server to perform operations using the key -- but you could log what operations are performed.
Looks like you are correct: WebUSB and WebBluetooth and WebAuth don't already cover HSM use cases?
/? secure enclave browser
But WebCrypto: "PROPOSAL: Add support for general (hardware backed) cryptographic signatures and key exchange #263" https://github.com/w3c/webcrypto/issues/263
Show HN: Classic FPS Wolfenstein 3D brought in the browser via Emscripten
TuxMath and TuxTyping are FOSS games written with SDL.
Giving your experience with porting Wolfenstein 3D SDL to emscripten, would it be easier to rewrite TuxMath given the exercise XML files or port it to WASM/emscripten (and emscripten-forge)?
Notably, the TuxMath RPM currently segfaults with recent Fedora but the Flatpak (which presumably statically-ships it's own copy of SDL) does work fine. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.tux4kids.tuxmath https://github.com/tux4kids/tuxmath
(Other someday priorities: Looking at SensorCraft, wanting to port it to (JupyterLite WASM) notebooks w/ jupyter-book)
The latest Wolfenstein where you're girls that respawn only if tagteam is good, too; Wolfenstein: Youngblood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein
Porting SDL(2) games with Emscripten to get an actual WASM output is pretty straightforward. Getting the game to run properly is another story. If the game has additional dependencies, you have to build them separatly with Emscripten and link them in finally. Heavy use of the filesystem has to be commented out as well (browser tab is a sandbox).
emscripten-forge builds a ~condaenv of recipes with empack; like conda-forge: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/empack
There's not yet an SDL recipe yet: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...
Re: emscripten fs implementations: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15041#i... https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/315
Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases
Hi HN! We just released the public alpha version of Mathesar (https://mathesar.org/, code: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar).
Mathesar is an open source tool that provides a spreadsheet-like interface to a PostgreSQL database.
I was originally inspired by wanting to build something like Dabble DB. I was in awe of their user experience for working with relational data. There’s plenty of “relational spreadsheet” software out there, but I haven’t been able to find anything with a comparable UX since Twitter shut Dabble DB down.
We're a non-profit project. The core team is based out of a US 501(c)(3).
Features:
* Built on Postgres: Connect to an existing Postgres database or set one up from scratch.
* Utilizes Postgres Features: Mathesar’s UI uses Postgres features. e.g. "Links" in the UI are foreign keys in the database.
* Set up Data Models: Easily create and update Postgres schemas and tables.
* Data Entry: Use our spreadsheet-like interface to view, create, update, and delete table records.
* Data Explorer: Use our Data Explorer to build queries without knowing anything about SQL or joins.
* Schema Migrations: Transfer columns between tables in two clicks in the UI.
* Custom Data Types:: Custom data types for emails and URLs (more coming soon), validated at the database level.
Links:
CODE: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar
LIVE DEMO: https://demo.mathesar.org/
DOCS: https://docs.mathesar.org/
COMMUNITY: https://wiki.mathesar.org/en/community
WEBSITE: https:/mathesar.org/
SPONSOR US: https://github.com/sponsors/centerofci or https://opencollective.com/mathesar
So happy to realize your stack includes Python, Postgres, Typescript and Svelte because I once flirted with such idea for a personal project. I'm inspired.
If I may ask, have you found using a Typed language such as Typescript has changed your tendency to use Python for other tasks, given that it isn't typed? [0]
[0] - I understand that types can be added on top, but I never found the integration to work that well with mypy when I last tried it many years ago.
I haven't because I'm Python biased. ;) However, for Web I've found myself leaning to TypeScript for type-safety and DX reasons.
Have you ever tried [Pydantic](https://docs.pydantic.dev)!? It may be what you need for type safety / data validation.
JSONLD types are specified with @type, and the range of a @type attribute includes rdfs:Class.
icontract and pycontracts (Design-by-Contract programming) have runtime type and constraint checking; data validation. Preconditions, Command, Postconditions (assertions, assertions of invariance after command C_funcname executed) https://github.com/Parquery/icontract
pydantic_schemaorg: https://github.com/lexiq-legal/pydantic_schemaorg
> Pydantic_schemaorg contains all the models defined by schema.org. The pydantic classes are auto-generated from the schema.org model definitions that can be found on https://schema.org/version/latest/schemaorg-current-https.js... [ https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/tree/main/data/releas... ]
Portable low-field MRI scanners could revolutionize medical imaging
How does this MRI neuroimaging capability differ from openwater's Phase Wave aoproach? https://www.openwater.cc/technology
Is MRI-level neuroimaging possible with just NIRS Near-Infrared Spectroscopy?
First Law of Thermodynamics Breakthrough Upends Equilibrium Theory in Physics
Laws of Thermodynamics (in 2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics :
> The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature: If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.
> The first law of thermodynamics states that, when energy passes into or out of a system (as work, heat, or matter), the system's internal energy changes in accordance with the law of conservation of energy.
> The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases. A common corollary of the statement is that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder body to a warmer body.
> The third law of thermodynamics states that a system's entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of non-crystalline solids (glasses), the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero. [2]
First law of thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics
Quantum thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_thermodynamics
Thermal quantum field theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_quantum_field_theory :
> In theoretical physics, thermal quantum field theory (thermal field theory for short) or finite temperature field theory is a set of methods to calculate expectation values of physical observables of a quantum field theory at finite temperature.
From the article:
> [170 years ago] the technology of the time dictated the gases or fluids that people would have studied are in equilibrium at the densities and temperatures that they were using back then.”
"Quantifying Energy Conversion in Higher-Order Phase Space Density Moments in Plasmas" (2023) https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.085201
- "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854
- Phase diagram > Types; where is plasma in this diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram#Types
Potential applications?:
- "Thin film" and compact pulsed fusion plasma confinement reactor thermoelectric efficiency ; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy
- What do plasmas compute, as a computation medium per Constructor Theory and/or an information medium in deep space?
- Can laser transmutation be achieved more efficiently with the heat of a sustained compact fusion plasma reactor? 4He and 3He are useful outputs with an equilibrium price in recent years, apparently.
There should probably be a facility with omnidirectional conveyors for automated sample testing that runs samples next to the heat?
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
The course videos: "Missing Semester IAP 2020" https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyzOVJj3bHQuloKGG59rS43e2...
Software Carpentry has some similar, OER lessons: https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/
DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero
Worth noting that while AlphaGo and AlphaZero are incredible achievements, the amount of actual code to implement them isn't very much.
If you have the research paper, someone in the field could reimplement them in a few days.
Then there is the large compute cost for training them to produce the trained weights.
So, opensourcing these bits of work without the weights isn't as major a thing as you might imagine.
> If you have the research paper, someone in the field could reimplement them in a few days.
Hi I did this while I was at Google Brain and it took our team of three more like a year. The "reimplementation" part took 3 months or so and the rest of the time was literally trying to debug and figure out all of the subtleties that were not quite mentioned in the paper. See https://openreview.net/forum?id=H1eerhIpLV
Replication crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis :
> The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
People should publish automated tests. How does a performance-optimizer know that they haven't changed the output of there are no known-good inputs and outputs documented as executable tests? Pytest-hypothesis seems like a nice compact way to specify tests.
AlphaZero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero
GH topic "AlphaZero" https://github.com/topics/alphazero
I believe ther are one or more JAX implementations of AlphaZero?
Though there's not yet a quantum-inference-based self-play (AlphaZero) algorithm?
TIL about the modified snow plow problem is a variation on TSP, and there are already quantum algos capable of optimally solving TSP.
I think I agree with everything you've said here, but just want to note that while we absolutely should (where relevant) expect published code including automated tests, we should not typically consider reproduction that reuses that code to be "replication" per se. As I understand it, replication isn't merely a test for fraud (which rerunning should typically detect) and mistakes (which rerunning might sometimes detect) but also a test that the paper successfully communicates the ideas such that other human minds can work with them.
Sources of variance; Experimental Design, Hardware, Software, irrelevant environmental conditions/state, Data (Sample(s)), Analysis
Can you run the notebook again with the exact same data sample (input) and get the same charts and summary statistics (output)? Is there a way to test the stability of those outputs over time?
Can you run the same experiment (the same 'experimental design'), ceteris paribus (everything else being equal) and a different sample (input) and get a very similar output? Is it stable, differentiable, independent, nonlinear, reversible; Does it converge?
Now I have to go look up the definitions for Replication, Repeatability, Reproducibility
Replication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication (disambiguation)
Replication_(scientific_method) -> Reproducibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility :
> Measures of reproducibility and repeatability: In chemistry, the terms reproducibility and repeatability are used with a specific quantitative meaning. [7] In inter-laboratory experiments, a concentration or other quantity of a chemical substance is measured repeatedly in different laboratories to assess the variability of the measurements. Then, the standard deviation of the difference between two values obtained within the same laboratory is called repeatability. The standard deviation for the difference between two measurement from different laboratories is called reproducibility. [8] These measures are related to the more general concept of variance components in metrology.
Replication (statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_(statistics) :
> In engineering, science, and statistics, replication is the repetition of an experimental condition so that the variability associated with the phenomenon can be estimated. ASTM, in standard E1847, defines replication as "... the repetition of the set of all the treatment combinations to be compared in an experiment. Each of the repetitions is called a replicate."
> Replication is not the same as repeated measurements of the same item: they are dealt with differently in statistical experimental design and data analysis.
> For proper sampling, a process or batch of products should be in reasonable statistical control; inherent random variation is present but variation due to assignable (special) causes is not. Evaluation or testing of a single item does not allow for item-to-item variation and may not represent the batch or process. Replication is needed to account for this variation among items and treatments.
Accuracy and precision: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision :
> In simpler terms, given a statistical sample or set of data points from repeated measurements of the same quantity, the sample or set can be said to be accurate if their average is close to the true value of the quantity being measured, while the set can be said to be precise if their standard deviation is relatively small.
Reproducible builds; to isolate and minimize software variance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
Re: reproducibility, containers, Jupyter books, REES, repo2docker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32965961 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-32965961 (Ctrl-F #linkedreproducibility)
Emacs is on F-Droid
This F-Droid emacs appears to have been build straight from the emacs repo which is cool! I was hoping for a screenshot but I couldn't find one.
I have emacs installed in Termux on Android. Termux provides an extra button bar above the main keyboard for things like Ctrl, arrow keys, Esc, Meta which makes emacs just about usable in Termux. Without those things it would be unusable!
Without the magic button bar you'd need the hackers keyboard which works very well on tablets but it is just a bit squashed for phones unless you use them in landscape.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
For good measure, let's share the link to Hacker's Keyboard on F-droid while we are at it :-)
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboar...
Here's how to install conda, mamba, and pip with MambaForge in Termux w/ proot from FDroid because there are no official APKs on the play store as is now necessary to bless binaries with context labels: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/s...
Physicists Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy Out of Nothing
Energy teleportation in 2023:
> Now in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon."
Quantum foam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
Vikings went to Mediterranean for ‘summer jobs’ as mercenaries, left graffiti
Would you put graffiti on your own vehiclr?
Careers for graphic artists with BA degrees
Prehistoric art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art
1. "Encino Man" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encino_Man https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05fc8m&hl=en-US&q=Enc...
Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
Perhaps Facebook should again require an email address at an approving college or university for sign up.
But what about supporting the NCMEC National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, without biometrics due to new laws?
Can you teach your daughters to be considerate of others on the internet?
They used to tell us not to put any personal information online as kids; no real names, etc.
Perhaps social media is a mirror from which we can determine parenting approach?
Are violent video games less bad than social media for which unhealthily-competitive strata?
"Please do not bully people on the internet because:"
"Please be considerate and helpful on the internet because:"
StopBullying.gov: https://www.stopbullying.gov/
"How to Make a Family Media Use Plan" (HealthyChildten.org (AAP)) https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/Media/Pa...
Internet safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_safety
[after school] emotional restraint collapse: https://www.google.com/search?q=emotional+restraint+collapse :
; It's exhausting for many of us to withhold nonverbal emotions all day; and so after school a minute to just chill without typical questioning may or may not help prevent bullying on the internet
TIL Iceland provides vouchers for whatever after school activities: taxes pay for sports and other programs.
The fundamental thermodynamic costs of communication
I like how "Due to the generality of our model, our findings could help explain empirical observations of how thermodynamic costs of information transmission make inverse multiplexing energetically favorable in many real-world communication systems." makes it sound like biology is not the real world
Took me a while to understand this comment. I'm not a biologist.
A nerve, is a whole big bundle of axons[1]. Looks like each bundle carries hundreds or thousands of connections down to a muscle.
1 http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/physio/vlab/other_exps/CAP/ner...
I am a neurobiologist and still don't understand the comment. The authors acknowledge biology in the first sentence.
wrt. claims in the full article however I have an issue with this observation...
> Another feature common to many biological and artificial communication systems is that they split a stream of information over multiple channels, i.e., they inverse multiplex. Often this occurs even when a single one of the channels could handle the entire communication load. For example, multiple synapses tend to connect adjacent neurons and multiple neuronal pathways tend to connect brain regions.
I dont see how a "single channel" i.e. a single synapse would suffice as the entire information output unit of a neuron. Making multiple synaptic connections is fundamental to the way neural networks perform computations.
Furthermore, representational drift observes that a biological single neuron's output given activation is not stable over time; which implies that there is greater emergent complexity than is modeled with ANNs (which have stable outputs given training, NN topology parameters, and activation functions that effectively weight training samples (which are usually also noise))
/? Representational drift brain https://www.google.com/search?q=representational+drift+brain ...
"Causes and consequences of representational drift" (2019) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7385530/
> The nervous system learns new associations while maintaining memories over long periods, exhibiting a balance between flexibility and stability. Recent experiments reveal that neuronal representations of learned sensorimotor tasks continually change over days and weeks, even after animals have achieved expert behavioral performance. How is learned information stored to allow consistent behavior despite ongoing changes in neuronal activity? What functions could ongoing reconfiguration serve? We highlight recent experimental evidence for such representational drift in sensorimotor systems, and discuss how this fits into a framework of distributed population codes. We identify recent theoretical work that suggests computational roles for drift and argue that the recurrent and distributed nature of sensorimotor representations permits drift while limiting disruptive effects. We propose that representational drift may create error signals between interconnected brain regions that can be used to keep neural codes consistent in the presence of continual change. These concepts suggest experimental and theoretical approaches to studying both learning and maintenance of distributed and adaptive population codes.
"The geometry of representational drift in natural and artificial neural networks" (2022) https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... :
> [...] We examine stimulus representations from fluorescence recordings across hundreds of neurons in the visual cortex using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging and we corroborate previous studies finding that such representations change as experimental trials are repeated across days. This phenomenon has been termed “representational drift”. In this study we geometrically characterize the properties of representational drift in the primary visual cortex [...]
> The features we observe in the neural data are similar to properties of artificial neural networks where representations are updated by continual learning in the presence of dropout, i.e. a random masking of nodes/weights, but not other types of noise. Therefore, we conclude that a potential reason for the representational drift in biological networks is driven by an underlying dropout-like noise while continuously learning and that such a mechanism may be computational advantageous for the brain in the same way it is for artificial neural networks, e.g. preventing overfitting.
"Neurons are fickle: Electric fields are more reliable for information" (2022) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220311115326.h... :
> [...] And when the scientists trained software called a "decoder" to guess which direction the animals were holding in mind, the decoder was relatively better able to do it based on the electric fields than based on the neural activity.
> This is not to say that the variations among individual neurons is meaningless noise, Miller said. The thoughts and sensations of people and animals experience, even as they repeat the same tasks, can change minute by minute, leading to different neurons behaving differently than they just did. The important thing for the sake of accomplishing the memory task is that the overall field remains consistent in its representation.
> "This stuff that we call representational drift or noise may be real computations the brain is doing, but the point is that at that next level up of electric fields, you can get rid of that drift and just have the signal," Miller said.
> The researchers hypothesize that the field even appears to be a means the brain can employ to sculpt information flow to ensure the desired result. By imposing that a particular field emerge, it directs the activity of the participating neurons.
> Indeed, that's one of the next questions the scientists are investigating: Could electric fields be a means of controlling neurons?
/? representational drift site:github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=representational+drift+site%...
Computational neuroscience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_neuroscience :
> Models in theoretical neuroscience are aimed at capturing the essential features of the biological system at multiple spatial-temporal scales, from membrane currents, and chemical coupling via network oscillations, columnar and topographic architecture, nuclei, all the way up to psychological faculties like memory, learning and behavior. These computational models frame hypotheses that can be directly tested by biological or psychological experiments.
Are you making some sort of point, or just dumping content?
Perhaps I was too polite. The collapsed entropy (absent real world noise per observation) of the binary relations in the brain is a useful metric.
Interesting take on being impolite - making a basic statement using overtly pretensions and opaque language?
> [...] Here we present the first study that rigorously combines such a framework, stochastic thermodynamics, with Shannon information theory. We develop a minimal model that captures the fundamental features common to a wide variety of communication systems. We find that the thermodynamic cost in this model is a convex function of the channel capacity, the canonical measure of the communication capability of a channel. We also find that this function is not always monotonic, in contrast to previous results not derived from first principles physics. These results clarify when and how to split a single communication stream across multiple channels. In particular, we present Pareto fronts that reveal the trade-off between thermodynamic costs and channel capacity when inverse multiplexing. Due to the generality of our model, our findings could help explain empirical observations of how thermodynamic costs of information transmission make inverse multiplexing energetically favorable in many real-world communication systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04320
What is the Shannon entropy interpretation of e.g. (quantum wave function) amplitude encoding?
"Quantum discord" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord
> In quantum information theory, quantum discord is a measure of nonclassical correlations between two subsystems of a quantum system. It includes correlations that are due to quantum physical effects but do not necessarily involve quantum entanglement.
Isn't there more entropy if we consider all possible nonlocal relations between bits; or, is which entropy metric independent of redundant coding schemes between points in spacetime?
New neural network architecture inspired by neural system of a worm
It makes a good headline, but reading over the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00556-7.pdf) it doesn’t seem biologically-inspired. It seems like they found a way to solve nonlinear equations in constant time via an approximation, then turned that into a neural net.
More generally, I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice. But saying that out loud feels like daring history to make a fool of me.
My view is that biology just happened to evolve how it did, so there’s no point in copying it; it worked because it worked. If we have to train networks from scratch, then we have to find our own solutions, which will necessarily be different than nature’s. I find analogies useful; dividing a model into short term memory vs long term memory, for example. But it’s best not to take it too seriously, like we’re somehow cloning a brain.
Not to mention that ML nets still don’t control their own loss functions, so we’re a poor shadow of nature. ML circa 2023 is still in the intelligent design phase, since we have to very intelligently design our networks. I await the day that ML networks can say “Ok, add more parameters here” or “Use this activation instead” (or learn an activation altogether — why isn’t that a thing?).
"I’m skeptical that biological systems will ever serve as a basis for ML nets in practice"
First of all, ML engineers need to stop being so brainphiliacs, caring only about the 'neural networks' of the brain or brain-like systems. Lacrymaria olor has more intelligence, in terms of adapting to exploring/exploiting a given environment, than all our artificial neural networks combined and it has no neurons because it is merely a single-cell organism [1]. Once you stop caring about the brain and neurons and you find out that almost every cell in the body has gap junctions and voltage-gated ion channels which for all intents and purposes implement boolean logic and act as transistors for cell-to-cell communication, biology appears less as something which has been overcome and more something towards which we must strive with our primitive technologies: for instance, we can only dream of designing rotary engines as small, powerful, and resilient as the ATP synthase protein [2].
[1] Michael Levin: Intelligence Beyond the Brain, https://youtu.be/RwEKg5cjkKQ?t=202
[2] Masasuke Yoshida, ATP Synthase. A Marvellous Rotary Engine of the Cell, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11533724
> Once you stop caring about the brain and neurons and you find out that almost every cell in the body has gap junctions and voltage-gated ion channels which for all intents and purposes implement boolean logic and act as transistors for cell-to-cell communication, biology appears less as something which has been overcome and more something towards which we must strive with our primitive technologies: for instance, we can only dream of designing rotary engines as small, powerful, and resilient as the ATP synthase protein [2].
But what of wave function(s); and quantum chemistry at the cellular level? https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantumchemistry
Is emergent cognition more complex than boolean entropy, and are quantum primitives necessary to emulate apparently consistently emergent human cognition for whatever it's worth?
[Church-Turing-Deutsch, Deutsch's Constructor theory]
Is ATP the product of evolutionary algorithms like mutation and selection? Heat/Entropy/Pressure, Titration/Vibration/Oscillation, Time
From the article:
> The next step, Lechner said, “is to figure out how many, or how few, neurons we actually need to perform a given task.”
Notes regarding Representational drift* and remarkable resilience to noise in BNNs) from "The Fundamental Thermodynamic Cost of Communication: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770235
It's never just one neuron.
And furthermore, FWIU, human brains are not directed graphs of literally only binary relations.
In a human brain, there are cyclic activation paths (given cardiac electro-oscillations) and an imposed (partially extracerebral) field which nonlinearly noises the almost-discrete activation pathways and probably serves a feed-forward function; and in those paths through the graph, how many of the neuronal synapses are simple binary relations (between just nodes A and B)?
> The group also wants to devise an optimal way of connecting neurons. Currently, every neuron links to every other neuron, but that’s not how it works in C. elegans, where synaptic connections are more selective. Through further studies of the roundworm’s wiring system, they hope to determine which neurons in their system should be coupled together.
Is there an information metric which expresses maximal nonlocal connectivity between bits in a bitstring; that takes all possible (nonlocal, discontiguous) paths into account?
`n_nodes*2` only describes all of the binary, pairwise possible relations between the bits or qubits in a bitstring?
"But what is a convolution" https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/convolutions
Quantum discord: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord
Scientists find first evidence that black holes are the source of dark energy
Introduction to Datalog
In the last few months the mention of Datalog has increased, I wondered how it differed from graph databases and found a clear answer in SO [1]. I am not an incumbent but found graph databases and clause approaches interesting.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29192927/a-graph-db-vs-a... (2015)
I did an interview [1] with Kevin Feeney, one of the founders (no longer active) of TerminusDb, which goes into some depth about the difference between RDF stores and (property) graph databases, where the former is more closely aligned with datalog and logic programming. There are links to a really excellent series of blog posts by Kevin on this topic in the show notes.
[1] https://thesearch.space/episodes/5-kevin-feeney-on-terminusd...
With RDF* and SPARQL* ("RDF-star" and "SPARQL-star") how are triple (or quad) stores still distinct from property graphs?
RDFS and SHACL (and OWL) are optional in a triple store, which expects the subject and predicate to be string URIs, and there is an object datatype and optional language:
(?s ?p ?o <datatype> [lang])
(?subject:URI, ?predicate:URI, ?object:datatype, object_datatype, [object_language])
`a` means `rdf:type`; which does not require RDFS:
("#xyz", a, "https://schema.org/Thing")
("#xyz", rdf:type, "https://schema.org/Thing")
(?g ?s ?p ?o)
("https://example.org/ns/graphs/0", "#xyz", a, "https://schema.org/Thing")
("https://example.org/ns/graphs/1", "#xyz", a, "https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle")
Looks like they ended up needing to update basically most of the current specs: https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/rdf-star/tools
"RDF-star and SPARQL-star" (Draft Community Group Report; 08 December 2022) https://w3c.github.io/rdf-star/cg-spec/editors_draft.html
GH topics: rdf-star, rdfstar: https://github.com/topics/rdf-star, https://github.com/topics/rdfstar
pyDatalog does datalog with SQLAlchemy and e.g. just the SQLite database: https://github.com/pcarbonn/pyDatalog ; and it is apparently superseded by IDP-Z3: https://gitlab.com/krr/IDP-Z3/
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1000516851984723968 :
> A feature comparison of SQL w/ EAV, SPARQL/SPARUL, [SPARQL12 SPARQL-star, [T-SPARQL, SPARQLMT,]], Cypher, Gremlin, GraphQL, and Datalog would be a useful resource for evaluating graph query languages.
> I'd probably use unstructured text search to identify the relevant resources first.
Show HN: Polymath: Convert any music-library into a sample-library with ML
Polymath is a open-source tool that converts any music-library into a sample-library with machine learning. It separates songs into stems, quantizes to same BPM, detects key and much more. A game-changing workflow for music producers & DJ
Other cool #aiart things:
- "MusicLM: Generating music from text" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34543748
- /? awesome Generative AI site:GitHub.com https://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+generative+ai+site%3...
- #GenerativeArt #GenerativeMusic
- BespokeSynth DAW: https://github.com/BespokeSynth/BespokeSynth :
> [...] live-patchable environment, so you can build while the music is playing; VST, VST3, LV2 hosting; Python livecoding; MIDI, [...]
> Using Polymath's search capability to discover related tracks, it is a breeze to create a polished, hour-long mash-up DJ set
https://github.com/samim23/polymath#how-does-it-work :
> How does it work?
> - Music Source Separation is performed with the [facebook/demucs] neural network
> - Music Structure Segmentation/Labeling is performed with the [wayne391/sf_segmenter] neural network
> - Music Pitch Tracking and Key Detection are performed with [marl/Crepe] neural network
> - Music Quantization and Alignment are performed with [bmcfee/pyrubberband]
> - Music Info retrieval and processing is performed with [librosa/librosa]
Coffee won’t give you extra energy, just borrow a bit that you’ll pay for later
From the article:
> This is because the caffeine won’t bind forever, and the adenosine that it blocks doesn’t go away. So eventually the caffeine breaks down, lets go of the receptors and all that adenosine that has been waiting and building up latches on and the drowsy feeling comes back – sometimes all at once.
> So, the debt you owe the caffeine always eventually needs to be repaid, and the only real way to repay it is to sleep.
Does drinking water offset the exertion-resultant dehydration that caffeine and other stimulants tend to result in?
[dead]
Let Teenagers Sleep
As a teenager I was diagnosed with "ADD". Very intelligent, but unable to focus or complete assignments.
My life habits were carb heavy unhealthy food (from the cafeteria), soda, lack of sleep due to long school commute, not much exercise
As an adult, I eat no carbs, all meat and vegetables, I work from home and sleep in as far as I need every night. My thinking is laser sharp.
They tried to medicate me with all sorts of anti depression drugs and amphetamines. Turns out I was just very unhealthy, from a basic lifestyle perspective. And the school was pushing that lifestyle. My guidance counseler suggested I dont attend college, just a community college (despite the fact that I got admitted to a decent state school), or maybe go into the "trades".
These large scale school systems treat students like cattle, with zero regard for the long term effects. Many mental health concerns would disappear if people were actually healthy in the most basic sense.
/? ADHD and sleep; REM / non-REM: https://www.google.com/search?q=adhd+and+sleep
Sleep hygiene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene https://www.google.com/search?q=sleep+hygiene
- Enough exercise and water
- Otherwise, limit calories and/or protein in the preceding hours
Sleep induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_induction
Pranayama; breathing yoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pranayama
4-7-8 breathing: https://www.google.com/search?q=4-7-8+breathing
Attributed both to Army and Navy: https://www.fastcompany.com/90253444/what-happened-when-i-tr... :
> The Independent says the technique was first described in a book from 1981 called "Relax and Win: Championship Performance" by Lloyd Bud Winter.
/? "Relax and Win: Championship Performance" https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Relax+and+Win%3A+Champion... https://archive.org/details/Relax-and-Win_Championship-Perfo...
Why is there so much useless and unreliable software?
Linear logic has been known since 1987. The first release of Coq (dependent types for functional programming and writing proofs) was in 1989. The HoTTBook came out in 2013. Ada/SPARK 2014 came out the same year as Java 8 did. We also witnessed the Software Foundations series, the CompCert C compiler, the Sel4 microkernel, and the SPARKNaCl cryptographic library.
Instead of learning about those achievements and aiming to program for the same reliability, clarity, and sophistication, we see an abundance of software that cannot clearly describe their own behavior nor misbehavior.
Instead of incorporating the full functionality of XML/HTML/CSS/SVG/JS/WebGL into the development experience and providing ways to control them at the fundamental level, we reinvent crude approximations like the various web frameworks.
YAML and JSON often trumps XML/XSD until things get out of control, and even then, people still don't learn the lesson. Protobuf, flatbuffer, capnproto, and the like keep reinventing ASN.1.
Naive microservices partially reimplements Erlang's BEAM VM while ignoring all the hard parts that BEAM VM got right. Many people riding the microservice bandwagon have never even heard of Paxos, not to mention TLA+.
Many programmers keep learning new shining frameworks but are reluctant to learn about the crucial fundamentals, e.g., Introduction to Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, nor how to think clearly and unambiguously in the spirit of Coq/Agda/Lean.
No wonder ChatGPT exposes how shallow most of programming is and how lacking most programmers are in actual understanding. Linear logic and dependent types are there to help us design and think with clarity at a high level, but people would rather fumble around with OOP class hierarchies (participate in the pointless is-a/has-a arguments) and "architecture" design that only complicate things.
What is this madness? This doesn't sound like engineering.
The adoption curve of advanced technologies that solve it all. Is it just the cognitive burden of the tooling or the concepts, are the training methods different, a dearth of already trained talent and sufficient post-graduate or post-doctoral instructors, unclear signals between demand and a supply funnel?
The limited availability of Formal Methods and Formal Verification training.
The growing demand for safety critical software for things that are heavy and that move fast and that fly over our heads and our homes.
In order to train, you need to present URLs: CreativeWork(s) in an outline (a tree graph), identify competencies (typically according to existing curricula) and test for comprehension, and what else is necessary to boost retention for and of identified competencies?
There are many online courses, but so few on Computer Science Education. You can teach with autograded Jupyter notebooks and your own edX instance all hosted in OCI containers in your own Kubernetes cloud, for example. Containers and Ansible Playbooks help minimize cost and variance in that part of the learning stack.
We should all learn Coq and TLA+ and Lean, especially. What resources and traversal do you recommend for these possibly indeed core competencies? For which domains are no-code tools safe?
If we were to instead have our LLM (,ChatGPT,Codex,) filter expression trees in order to autocomplete from only Formally Verified code with associated Automated Tests, and e.g. Lean Mathlib, how would our output differ from that of an LLM training on code that may or may not have any tests?
Could that also implement POSIX and which other interfaces, please?
> The adoption curve of advanced technologies that solve it all. Is it just the cognitive burden of the tooling or the concepts, are the training methods different, a dearth of already trained talent and sufficient post-graduate or post-doctoral instructors, unclear signals between demand and a supply funnel?
> The limited availability of Formal Methods and Formal Verification training.*
From "Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709239 :
>>> From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :
>>>> Which universities teach formal methods?
>>>> - q=formal+verification https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+verification
>>>> - q=formal+methods https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+methods
>>>> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513922
Formal methods should be required course or curriculum competency for various Computer Science and Software Engineering credentials.
> The growing demand for safety critical software for things that are heavy and that move fast and that fly over our heads and our homes.
"The Case of the Killer Robot"
> In order to train, you need to present URLs: CreativeWork(s) in an outline (a tree graph), identify competencies (typically according to existing curricula) and test for comprehension, and what else is necessary to boost retention for and of identified competencies?
A Multi-track "ThingSequence" which covers; And there are URIs for the competencies and exercises that cover.
> There are many online courses, but so few on Computer Science Education. You can teach with autograded Jupyter notebooks and your own edX instance all hosted in OCI containers in your own Kubernetes cloud, for example. Containers and Ansible Playbooks help minimize cost and variance in that part of the learning stack.
Automation with tooling is necessary to efficiently compete. In order to support credentialing workflows that qualify point-in-time performance, it is advisable to adopt tools that support automation of grading, for example.
> We should all learn Coq and TLA+ and Lean, especially. What resources and traversal do you recommend for these possibly indeed core competencies?
Links above. When should Formal Methods be introduced in a post-secondary or undergraduate program? Is there any reason that a curriculum can't go from math proofs, to logical proofs, to logical argumentation?
> For which domains are no-code tools safe?
Unfortunately, no-code tools in even low-risk applications can be critical vulnerabilities if persons do not understand their limitations. For example, "we used to have already-printed [offline] forms on hand [before the new computerized workflows [enabled by no-code, no review development workflows]]".
Should there be 2 or 3 redundant processes with an additional component that discards low-level outputs if there is no consensus? Is that plus No-code tools safe?
> If we were to instead have our LLM (,ChatGPT,Codex,) filter expression trees in order to autocomplete from only Formally Verified code with associated Automated Tests, and e.g. Lean Mathlib, how would our output differ from that of an LLM training on code that may or may not have any tests?
You should not be autocompleting from a training corpus of code without tests.
> Could that also implement POSIX and which other interfaces, please?
Eventually, AI will produce an OS kernel that is interface compatible with what we need to run existing code.
How can experts assess whether there has been sufficient review of an [AI-generated] alternative interface implementation?
Not everybody should learn TLA+. It's a pretty niche tool and it's not helpful for a lot of kinds of software!
What are some of the limits of TLA+ for dynamic analysis? Which other tools model variable-latency distributed systems?
I don't think that most software is a variable-latency distributed system. I wouldn't use it for a simulation, for example, or anything which depends at a high level on non-integer numbers (TLA+ can't model-check floats or reals).
The Rust Implementation of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust
I wonder why not reimplement coreutils as library functions, to be used within an ad-hoc REPL. It would be much more flexible and extensible.
AFAIK, originally the reason why they were made as programs was that the available programming languages were too cumbersome for such use. Now we have plenty of experience making lightweight scripting languages that are pleasant to use in a live environment (vs premade script), so why give up the flexibility of ad-hoc scripting?
Isn't what you're describing basically a unix "shell" like bash, csh, zsh, etc?
I agree that something like bash leaves a lot to be desired in REPL functionality. Its ubiquity is convenient, however.
DIY 1,500W solar power electric bike (2022)
It's RadWagon 4 with white paint job, upgraded brakes/power controller, and solar panel at the top of the stock roof.
Not quite what I expected when I read the title.
Btw, the panel is 50W, and I assume the battery is stock, 672 Wh. That's 14+ hours of best-case sunlight to recharge fully. I wonder how practical is it.
Yeah, makes more sense to leave the solar panel in your backyard (saving some weight) and have spare battery always sitting on the solar charger.
Then you can bring your bike inside, in the shade, etc. — not having to always find sunlight to park in.
The only way bringing the solar panel with the bike makes sense is a multi-day ride. But as is being pointed out, you're going to be spending a lot more time sunbathing rather than biking under power.
<wagon in tow> Yeah, Good call boss.
The cost figures in this article about [rooftop,] wind do not take into account latest gen [Dyneema] ultralight rooftop solar:
"Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost" (2022) https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/10/14/rooftop-wind-energy-i...
> The scalable, “#motionless” #WindEnergy unit can produce 50% more energy than rooftop solar at the same cost, said the company.
> The technology leverages aerodynamics similar to #airfoils in a race car to capture and amplify each building’s airflow. The unit requires about 10% of the space required by solar panels and generates round-the-clock energy. Aeromine said unlike conventional wind turbines that are noisy, visually intrusive, and dangerous to migratory birds, the patented system is motionless and virtually silent.
> An #Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building facing the predominant wind direction. The company said the unit can minimize energy storage capacity needed to meet a building’s energy needs, producing energy in all weather conditions. With a small footprint on the roof, the unit can be combined with rooftop solar, providing a new tool in the toolkit for decarbonization and energy independence.
"18 Times More Power: MIT Researchers Have Developed Ultrathin Lightweight Solar Cells" (2022) https://scitechdaily.com/18-times-more-power-mit-researchers... :
> When they tested the device, the MIT researchers found it could generate 730 watts of power per kilogram when freestanding and about 370 watts-per-kilogram if deployed on the high-strength Dyneema fabric, which is about 18 times more power-per-kilogram than conventional solar cells.
> “A typical rooftop solar installation in Massachusetts is about 8,000 watts. To generate that same amount of power, our fabric photovoltaics would only add about 20 kilograms (44 pounds) to the roof of a house,” he says.
> They also tested the durability of their devices and found that, even after rolling and unrolling a fabric solar panel more than 500 times, the cells still retained more than 90 percent of their initial power generation capabilities.
E.g. Hyperlite Mountain Gear sells Dyneema ultralight backpacking packs and coats. There are Dyneema Patch Kits that work for various types of gear.
Wise to look at Ultralight backpacking gear before buying regular camping gear. Solarcore Aerogel is warm and light and also in encased in PVA foam rubber which is like a new wet suit. https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1600820322567041024 Kayaking bags are waterproof, but are there yet Dyneema ones?
You mightn't have understood?
730-370 watts/kilogram is the number to beat (for DIY electric bicycle applications)
And rooftop wind is competitive (for charging offline batteries)
Presumably, bicycling is like ultralight hiking: wHr/kg is the or a limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour
A pedaling electric bicycler could tow a solar wagon, eh
Actors Say They’re Being Asked to Sign Away Their Voice to AI
This is starting to sound eerily similar to that BoJack Horseman plotline, where he won an Oscar for a movie he never acted in, because he signed away his likeness and the director just used a 3d model of him because he was always too drunk to be on set.
But in all honesty though, this could be great news - imagine not needing to do recall shoots because the dialogue was bad, and you can fill in a few sentences with this technology instead. Of course, it will be abused and used to not compensate actors for their work properly.
But if it develops rapidly I could imagine games and animation using "stock voices" in their productions, just like designers often use stock imagery. I'm sure someone is happy to sign away their voice for a few grand, and provide it to a stock voice library.
S1M0̸NE (2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film) Frankenstein.
Her (2013) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) She's too smart for you anyway.
Upload (2020, 2022) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upload_(TV_series) She buys in game credits for his existence.
Faust / The Little Mermaid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust#Cinematic_adaptations
"Final cut, Suit!" - Billy Walsh, Entourage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recurring_Entourage_ch...
Final cut privilege: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_cut_privilege :
> typically reluctant
Why do we create modern desktop GUI apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript? (2022)
Because Web Standards are Portable and Accessible.
You can recreate the accessible GUI widget tree universe in ASM or WASM, but it probably won't be as accessible as standard HTML form elements unless you spend more time than you have for that component on it.
For example, video game devs tend to do this: their very own text widget (and hopefully a ui scaling factor) with a backgroundColor attribute - instead of CSS's background-color - and then it doesn't support tabindex or screen readers or high contrast mode or font scaling.
It's a widget tree with events either way, but Web Standards are Portable and Accessible (with a comparative performance cost that's probably with it)
> Because Web Standards are Portable and Accessible.
A good http-friendly GUI standard would be also (as I describe nearby). But do note that businesses still use mostly desktops for everyday CRUD and don't want to pay a large "mobile tax" if given a choice. YAGNI has been ignored, as the standards over-focused on social media and e-commerce at the expense of typical CRUD. CRUD ain't sexy but necessary and common.
It's not easy to do both desktop and mobile UI's well and inexpensively in one shot. I believe there are either inherent trade-offs between them, or that the grand unification UI framework has yet to be invented. (At least one that doesn't require UI rocket science.)
Flutter > See also is a good list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutter_(software)
/? flutter python ... TIL about flet: https://github.com/flet-dev/flet https://flet.dev/docs/guides/python/getting-started
Mobile-first development says develop the mobile app first and teh desktop version can get special features later; one responsive layout for Phone, Tablet, and desktop
Phosh (GTK) and KDE Plasma Mobile are alternatives to iOS and Android (which do have a terminal, bash, git, and a way to install CPython (w/ MambaForge ARM64 packages) and IPython)
Ask HN: Advice from people who strength train from home
I have a pullup bar and a Lebert Equalizer kind of thing. I live in a small room at my university. I am planning on training bodyweight or calisthenics as it is called popularly.
HNers who train from home using minimal weights or equipments, can you suggest a path for me.
I am looking for some hints on:
1. What is the bare minimum balanced routine I can start with?
2. How long should I stick to it before I see or feel actual results from it?
3. Diet? Eggs are easily available for me.
4. A bit about your journey. How you started and how have you progressed on parameters of strength, routine, size, energy, etc.
P.S: I came across this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Kboges where he suggests that to gain strength and general fitness you can train daily with 3 movements but not to failure. Is it possible?
My goals are to have enough muscle and strength so that I don't get tired doing chores lifting something for my household. I want this to go far into my old age so that I don't fall and spend my final years in a nursing home bed.
(Secondhand) Total Gym XLS & 4x 20lb 5gal bucket concrete weights on 1.25" fittings, Basketball filled with sand, occasional Yoga, lately very occasional Inline Skating up and down a hill with wrist guards and a MIPS helmet with a visor
(Soccer, then former middle of the pack Distance Running; then also weight training resistance training in a Weider cage with an 45lb bar and adjustable spotter bars, high pulley, low pulley, leg extension; then Bowflex; and now TotalGym and I prefer it. Lol, you watch the infomercial and you see the testimonials and you think "nobody's that happy with their without ever" and still I really do enjoy this equipment. (I have never been paid to endorse any fitness product or book.))
Calisthenics says that "time under tension" is more relevant than number of reps.
The TotalGym is a decent to good partner stretcher. "Don't slam the stack, and don't waste an opportunity to let it stretch you out"
Dance music has a higher tempo. Various apps will generate workout playlists with AFAIU a BPM ladder
The "high protein foods" part of Keto.
My understanding of Keto: if you eat too much sugar (including starchy carbs) without protein, the body learns to preferentially burn sugar and wastes the protein; so eat protein all day. We do need carbs to efficiently process protein. (And we do need fat for our brains: there is a reference DV daily value for fat for a reason. Ranch, Whole Milk, and Peanut Butter have fat.)
Omega-3s and Omega-6s would be listed under "Polyunsaturated Fats" if it were allowed to list them on the standard Nutrition Facts label instead of elsewhere on the packaging.
Omega 6:3 balance apparently affects endocannabinoid levels. Endocannabinoids help regulate diet and inflammation.
Antioxidants: Vitamins A, C, E,
Electrolytes: Water + Salt + Potassium (H20 + NaCl + K)
There are many lists of foods to eat for inflammation and inflammatory conditions.
Foods rich in anthocyanins tend to be high in nutrients; for example, blueberries, chard, and other dark leafy vegetables and fruits. Blueberry smoothie; premixed, frozen, fresh and washed with sprayed water+vinegar in a clip-on colander.
Pressure cooking is a relatively healthy way to prepare protein.
You can make a dozen hard-boiled or soft-boiled eggs with one instant pot pressure cooker in ~20 minutes and with less water than conventional boiling.
50g/day of Protein is 100% of the DV for a 2000 calorie diet, when you're not trying to gain muscle mass. Bodybuilders consume at least 100g or 150g of protein a day.
Tired of e.g. tuna, eggs, beef; I learned of "The No Meat Athlete Cookbook: Whole Food, Plant-Based Recipes to Fuel Your Workouts—and the Rest of Your Life", which has a bunch of ideas for vegan and vegetarian protein and nutrionally-balanced meals.
FWIU, vegan and vegetarian diets tend to have some common issues like e.g. magnesium deficiency.
I can't be mad at the lion for being omnivorous; but frustrated at the lion for being greedy and selfish in regards to ecology and smell. /? S tool reading infographic
Protein bars (20g: Huel, Aldi), Protein bread (10g/slice), Muscle Milk Pro (50g), Huel, Filtered water: Wide-mouth water bottles, Fish Oil (Omega-3s DHA & EPA), Olive Oil (<~380°F), spray Avocado Oil (Aldi), Peanut Butter, Whole Milk, Multigrain Cheerios over Total (in the 100% DV cereals category),
Supergrains: flax, chia, shelled hemp seed. Super grains mixed into peanut butter = $25 health food store peanut butter.
Healthy Eating Plate: Water, Fruits, Grains, Veggies, Protein. USDA Myplate: people need* Milk/Dairy (which is indeed basically impossible to create a synthetic analogue of, in terms of formula or)
Some greens have little more nutritional content than water and fiber. AFAIU, Chard is as nutritious as Spinach, which has iron (which is what Popeye eats to hopefully eventually woo Olive Oil)
Ice water diminishes appetite. Bread has filling carbs that you can eat with protein* (to stay closer to "ketosis", for example)
HIIT says don't rest for more than 15 seconds / 45 seconds between exercises / sets
My TotalGym workouts now are much more aerobic than when I started getting back to healthy and counted reps. I've put off adding more weight to the carriage bar (that certain TG models lierally support) for like a year and I've rounded-out in areas I mightn't have as a result.
I don't miss free weights, stacks / universal machines. After trying rings with nobody else around in the backyard, the TotalGym wins.
Certain (my parents') Bowflex units can't be upgraded with more or heavier tension rods; though the weighted non-inclined rowing is cool too.
Watched a few "Bodybuilding on a budget" [how to buy protein at at discount grocery store] yt videos. I usually eat cold, but Instant Pot for the win; TIL grill char is carcinogenic. With a second Instant Pot, you can do veggies separately from protein, which takes much longer to cook.
Show HN: DocsGPT, open-source documentation assistant, fully aware of libraries
Hi, This is a very early preview of a new project, I think it could be very useful. Would love to hear some feedback/comments
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659668 :
>> How do the responses compare to auto-summarization in terms of Big E notation and usefulness?
> Automatic summarization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization
> "Automatic summarization" GH topic: https://github.com/topics/automatic-summarization
Though now archived,
> Microsoft/nlp-recipes lists current NLP tasks that would be helpful for a docs bot: https://github.com/microsoft/nlp-recipes#content
NLP Tasks: Text Classification, Named Entity Recognition, Text Summarization, Entailment, Question Answering, Sentence Similarity, Embeddings, Sentiment Analysis, Model Explainability, and Auto-Annotatiom
On further review, there are more GitHub projects labeled with https://github.com/topics/text-summarization than "automatic-summarization"; e.g. awesome-text-summarization: https://github.com/icoxfog417/awesome-text-summarization and https://github.com/luopeixiang/awesome-text-summarization , which links to what look like relatively current benchmarks for SOTA performance in text summarization from the gh source repo of https://nlpprogress.com/ : https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-progress/blob/master/e...
Show HN: I turned my microeconomics textbook into a chatbot with GPT-3
I never really read my micro-econ textbook.
Looking up concepts from the book with Google yields SEO-y results.
So I used GPT-3 to make a custom chatbot I can query at any time.
How do the responses compare to auto-summarization in terms of Big E notation and usefulness?
> How do the responses compare to auto-summarization in terms of Big E notation and usefulness?
Automatic summarization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization
"Automatic summarization" GH topic: https://github.com/topics/automatic-summarization
Microsoft/nlp-recipes lists current NLP tasks that would be helpful for a docs bot: https://github.com/microsoft/nlp-recipes#content https://github.com/microsoft/nlp-recipes#content
ChatGPT is a bullshit generator but it can still be amazingly useful
Prompt engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering
/? inurl:awesome prompt engineering "llm" site:github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aawesome+prompt+engin...
XAI: Explainable Artificial Intelligence & epistomology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelli... :
> Explainable AI (XAI), or Interpretable AI, or Explainable Machine Learning (XML), [1] is artificial intelligence (AI) in which humans can understand the decisions or predictions made by the AI. [2] It contrasts with the "black box" concept in machine learning where even its designers cannot explain why an AI arrived at a specific decision. [3][4] By refining the mental models of users of AI-powered systems and dismantling their misconceptions, XAI promises to help users perform more effectively. [5] XAI may be an implementation of the social _ right to explanation _. [6] XAI is relevant even if there is no legal right or regulatory requirement. For example, XAI can improve the user experience of a product or service by helping end users trust that the AI is making good decisions. This way the aim of XAI is to explain what has been done, what is done right now, what will be done next and unveil the information the actions are based on. [7] These characteristics make it possible (i) to confirm existing knowledge (ii) to challenge existing knowledge and (iii) to generate new assumptions. [8]
Right to explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation
(Edit; all human)
/? awesome "explainable ai" https://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+%22explainable+ai%22
- (Many other great resources)
- https://github.com/neomatrix369/awesome-ai-ml-dl/blob/master... :
> Post model-creation analysis, ML interpretation/explainability
/? awesome "explainable ai" "XAI" https://www.google.com/search?q=awesome+%22explainable+ai%22...
I for one rue this commandeering of the word "engineering". No, most activities involving stuff are not "engineering". Especially flailing weakly from a distance at an impenetrable tangle of statistical correlations. What a disservice we are doing ourselves.
A more logged approach with IDK all previous queries in a notebook and their output over time would be more scientific-like and thus closer to "Engineering": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
> Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings.[1] The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, and types of application.
"How and why (NN, LLM, AI,) prompt outputs change over time; with different models, and with different training data" {@type=[schema:Review || schema:ScholarlyArticle], schema:dateModified=}
Query:
(@id, "prompt", XML:lang, w3c:prov-enance)
QueryResult:
(@id, query.id, datetime, api_service_uri, "prompt_ouput")
Sh1mmer – An exploit capable of unenrolling enterprise-managed Chromebooks
I wouldn't have a career in IT if I hadn't spent many hours at ages 11 to 15 trying to get round my schools network security. My logon was frequently disabled for misuse and I was even suspended for a couple of days once but I learnt more that way than in any class I've ever taken.
I relate to this. As someone currently in high school, messing around with web proxies and code deployment sights, and web-based IDE's trying to run Dwarf Fortress in my school browser has taught me more about computers and networks then just about anything else. It is painfully easy to get around school filters these days. I've never really messed with unenrollment because you do need enrollment to access the testing websites but I've been trying to get into Developer Mode to get linux apps, but the IT guys must have thought ahead on that one.
Chromebooks don't even have a Terminal for the kids. Vim's great, but VScode with Jupyter Notebook support would make the computers we bought for them into great offline calculators, too.
VSCode on a Chromebook requires VMs and Containers which require "Developer Tools" and "Powerwash"; or the APK repack of VSCodium that you can't even sideload and manually update sometimes (because it's not on the 15-30% cut, and must use their payment solution, app store with static analysis and code signing at upload).
AFAIU, Chromebooks with Family Link and Chromebooks for Education do not have a Terminal, bash, git, VMs (KVM), Containers (Docker/Podman/LXC/LXD/gvisor), third-party repos with regular security updates, or even Python; which isn't really Linux (and Windows, Mac, and Linux do already at present support such STEM for Education use cases).
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168491 :
> Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-packages.html#lo...
There's also MambaLite, which is part of the emscripten-forge project; along with BinderLite. https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes (Edit: Micropip or Mambalite or picomamba or Zig. : "A 116kb WASM of Blink that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376094 )
It looks like there are now tests for VScode in the default Power washable 'penguin' Debian VM that you get with Chromebook Developer Tools; but still the kids are denied VMs and Containers or local accounts (with kid-safe DoH/DoT at lesat) and so they can't run VScode locally on the Chromebooks that we bought for them.
Why do I need "Developer Tools" access to run VScode and containers on a Chromebook; but not on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer? If containers are good enough for our workloads hosted in the cloud, they should be good enough for local coding and calculating in e.g. Python. https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...
Good point. Wasn't aware of the Family Link restrictions. Will see what can be done here.
Disclaimer: I work on ChromeOS.
VSCode + containers + the powerwash feature would enable kids to STEM.
Are flatpaks out of the question? Used to be "Gnome and Chrome" on ~Gentoo.
Shouldn't the ChromiumOS host be running SELinux, if the ARC support requires extended filesystem attributes for `ls -alz` and `ps -aufxz` to work?
Chromium and Chrome appear to be running unconfined? AppArmor for Firefox worked years ago?
https://www.google.com/search?q=chromium+selinux ; chrome_selinux ?
It seems foolish to have SELinux in a guest VM but not the host.
Task: "Reprovision" the default VMs and Containers after "Powerwash" `rm -rf`s everything
`adb shell pm list packages` and `adb install` a list of APKs and CRXs.
Here's chromebook_ansible: https://github.com/seangreathouse/chromebook-ansible/blob/ma...
Systemd-homed is portable. Still, "Reprovision" the broken userspace for the user.
Local k8s like microshift that does container-selinux like RH / Fedora, with Gnome and Waydroid would be cool to have for the kids.
Podman-desktop (~Docker Desktop) does k8s now.
K8s defaults to blocking containers that run as root now, and there's no mounting thee --privileged docket socket w/ k8s either. Gitea + DroneCI/ACT/ci_runner w/ rootless containers. Gvisor is considered good enough for shared server workloads.
Repo2docker + caching is probably close to "kid proof" or "reproducible".
VScode has "devcontainer.json". Scipy stacks ( https://jupyter-docker-stacks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using... ) and Kaggle/docker-python (Google) take how many GB to run locally for users < 13 who we don't afford cloud shells with SSH (Colab with SSH, JupyterHub (TLJH w/ k8s),) for either.
Task: Learn automated testing, bash, git, and python (for Q12 K12CS STEM)
>> *Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"?"
"ENH: Terminal and Shell: BusyBox, bash/zsh, git; WebVM," https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/949
I actually use a Web Assembly port of VIM on my school computer.
Nice. TIL about vim.wasm: https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm
Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab have a web terminal that's good enough to do SSH and Vim. Mosh Mobile Shell is more resilient to internet connection failure.
Again though, Running everything in application-sandboxed WASM all as the current user is a security regression from the workload isolation features built into VMs and Containers (which Windows, Mac, and Linux computers support in the interests of STEM education and portable component reuse).
When Will Fusion Energy Light Our Homes?
It’s lighting my home right now. Looks like clear skies today.
We get free EM radiation from the free nuclear fusion reaction at the center of our solar system; and all of the other creatures find that sufficient for survival.
None of the other creatures require energy to heat their homes, grow food, travel, keep the lights on, or ship cargo in a large inter-connected grid of supply that feeds billions of people.
Everything is also manufactured out of petroleum derivatives. Without it, we go back to making literally everything out of wood and metal, or not making it. 90% of the items you have contact with everyday is made with some kind of petroleum derivative.
EV vehicles are impossible to manufacture without petroleum, so this is certainly a lot more nuanced than just free energy from space...
Given the petroleum is made from creatures[0] which were entirely powered by sunlight, it should be clear that petroleum can be produced by sunlight.
[0] mostly plants, IIRC
Well, not all plastics are made from petroleum and not all that are made from petroleum need to be made from petroleum, it’s just cheaper because there’s a ton left over. Without a petroleum based economy we would either use petroleum for plastics or use other sources of monomers. Plastic would certainly be a lot more expensive, though, especially during a transition phase to other monomer sources. But it’s simply untrue to say petroleum is required to build EVs, it’s just that today that’s what is used as the basis monomers for the plastics.
It’s also factually true, despite a seeming loss of recognition in the last decade, that fossil fuels are not limitless. We might as well not wait for exhaustion before planning about what to do next, no?
Those are "biopolymers", "biocomposites", but like Soy Dream not "bioplastics"?
FWIU, algae, cellulose, and flax or hemp are strong candidates for sustainable eco-friendly products and packaging.
No I was thinking of monomers like bio plastics. But sure, biopolymers etc can work too as replacements. Silicon based monomer/polymers are also very promising. Carbon is a small amount of the earth, while silicon is extraordinarily plentiful. Silicone rubbers are probably the most common example. They use silicon instead of carbon for the backbone.
uh huh, uh huh, and WHY do you suppose EVERYTHING involves the use of petroleum?
It's a classic capitalist evasion of externalities.
Every single drill site is toxic waste disaster, that no one ever has to pay for (except of course, the impoverised who live down stream).
To ignore the many gigawatts of free energy beamed in from space because petroleum will still be used in some way is evading the question.
The fact remains: free fusion power is heating and lighting our homes every time we open a window shade.
And if the combined mafia influence of the contruction-mafia and the petro-mafia didn't have us building houses with NO relation to how they point at the sun, we would use that energy to MUCH greater efficiency...
have you ever been to a drill site? tons where I live. I'd have a picnic out there today if it weren't so cold. Gotta watch for h2s I suppose.
Yes, in fact I worked on them. Enjoy your picnic on top of all the sludge buried next to the wellhead...
Fusion energy is 30 years away and always will be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U
This was before ignition was confirmed in a lab setting though so now the countdown has actually begun
"Ignition" was as much a marketing term as anything. It relied on a very specific accounting of energy-in vs energy-out, which no one doubted could be done.
The fact is that they used 50 kWh of energy and produced 0.7 kWh of energy. The fact that at some tiny part of the flow diagram we achieved > 1:1 energy doesn't change the fact that the actual fraction of energy out compared to energy in has barely changed in ten years.
The latest experiment produced a Q-total of 0.014, while before it was something like 0.012.
We can't just hand-wave away the energy in.
Watched the Helion Learn Engineering video, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
Has that net-positive finding been reproduced yet in any other Tokamoks?
How does this compare to Helion's (non-Tokamok, non-Stellerator fusion plasma confinement reactor) published stats for the Trenta and Polaris products?
Could SYLOS or other CPA Chirped Pulse Amplification lasers be useful for this problem with or without the high heat of a preexisting plasma reaction to laser pulse next to? https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+cpa
Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original
I was surprised to see this in my email today:
> Your private repository baobabKoodaa/laaketutka-scripts (forked from futurice/how-to-get-healthy) has been deleted because you are no longer a collaborator on futurice/how-to-get-healthy.
That was an MIT-licensed open source project I worked on years ago. We published the source code for everyone to use, so I certainly did not expect to lose access to it just because someone at my previous company has been doing spring cleaning at GitHub! I had a 100% legal fork of the project, and now it's gone... why?
Turns out I don't even have a local copy of it anymore, so this actually caused me data loss. I'm fine with losing access to this particular codebase, I'm not using HN as customer support to regain access. I just wanted everyone to be aware that GitHub does this.
I have a number of git repos that the original developers deleted - because I sync’d them to a usb stick with gitea. I think that is how you have to do it - never entrust a service, especially a free one, with your only copy of anything you value.
If the YouTube algorithm nukes your account and all your videos, you should be ready to upload them to a new account. Same with anything else digital.
My current is standard is one copy in AWS S3 which is super reliable but too pricy for daily use, and one copy in Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze B2 which might or might not be reliable (time will tell) but is hella cheap for daily use.
> because I sync’d them to a usb stick with gitea
Just a tip: no need to use gitea if you want to replicate a git repository to somewhere else on disk/other disk.
Just do something like this:
mkdir /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo
(cd /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo && git init)
git remote add backup /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo
git push backup master
Even better with
cd /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo && git init --bare
More detail here:
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/setting-up-a-reposit...
Yeah, better in terms of saving space, but I think it confuses some people, hence I didn't use it in my above example. Previous time I recommended a co-worker to use the `push to a directory` way of copying a git repository, I made them create a bare repository, and they ended up going into the directory to verify it worked and not seeing what they expected. Cue me having to explain the difference between a normal repository and a bare one. It also confused them into thinking that a bare repository isn't just another git repository but a "special" one you can sync to, while the normal one you couldn't.
So in the end, simple is simple :) Unless you're creating remote repositories at scale, you probably won't notice a difference in storage usage.
I hear all that, but --bare is necessary in this case because git (by default) won't let you push to a non-bare filesystem branch:
~/temp/a:master $ git push backup
Enumerating objects: 3, done.
Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 212 bytes | 212.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master
remote: error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository
remote: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent
remote: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match
remote: the work tree to HEAD.
...
To ../b
! [remote rejected] master -> master (branch is currently checked out)
error: failed to push some refs to '../b' git clone --mirror
git clone --bare
git push --mirror
git push --all
> So it's usually best to use --mirror for one time copies, and just use normal push (maybe with --all) for normal uses.
git push: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-push
git clone: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone
The Qubit Game (2022)
"World Quantum Day: Meet our researchers and play The Qubit Game" https://blog.google/technology/research/world-quantum-day-me... :
> In celebration of World Quantum Day, the Google Quantum AI team wanted to try a different way to introduce people to the world of quantum computing. So we teamed up with Doublespeak Games to make The Qubit Game – a playful journey to building a quantum computer, one qubit at a time, while solving challenges that quantum engineers face in their daily work. If you succeed, you’ll discover new upgrades for your in-game quantum computer, complete big research projects, and hopefully become a little more curious about how we’re building quantum computers.
Additional Q12 (K12 QIS Quantum Information Science) ideas?:
- Exercise: Port QuantumQ quantum puzzle game exercises to a quantum circuit modeling and simulation library like Cirq (SymPy) or qiskit or tequila: https://github.com/ray-pH/quantumQ
- Exercise: Model fair random coin flips with qubit basis encoding in a quantum circuit simulator in a notebook
- Exercise: Model fair (uniformly distributed) 6-sided die rolls with basis state embedding or amplitude embedding or better (in a quantum circuit simulator in a notebook)
- QIS K-12 Framework (for K12 STEM, HS Computer Science, HS Physics) https://q12education.org/learning-materials-framework
- tequilahub/tequila-tutorials: https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila-tutorials
Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
MAME: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME
"TI-83 Plus Calculator Emulation" https://archive.org/details/ti83p-calculator
TI-83 series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-83_series :
> Symbolic manipulation (differentiation, algebra) is not built into the TI-83 Plus. It can be programmed using a language called TI-BASIC, which is similar to the BASIC computer language. Programming may also be done in TI Assembly, made up of Z80 assembly and a collection of TI provided system calls. Assembly programs run much faster, but are more difficult to write. Thus, the writing of Assembly programs is often done on a computer.
I had a TI-83 Plus in middle school, and then bought a TI-83 Plus Silver edition for high school. The TI-83 Plus was the best calculator allowed for use by the program back then. FWIU these days it's the TI-84 Plus, which has USB but no CAS Computer Algebra System.
The JupyterLite build of JupyterLab - and https://NumPy.org/ - include the SymPy CAS Computer Algebra System and a number of other libraries; and there's an `assert` statement in Python; but you'd need to build your own JupyterLab WASM bundle to host as static HTML if you want to include something controversial like pytest-hypothesis. https://jupyterlite.rtfd.io/
Better than a TI-83 Plus emulator? Install MambaForge in a container to get the `conda` and `mamba` package managers (and LLVM-optimized CPython on Win, Mac, Lin) and then `mamba install -y jupyterlab tabulate pandas matplotlib sympy`; or login to e.g. Google Colab, Cocalc, or https://Kaggle.com/learn ( https://GitHub.com/Kaggle/docker-python ) .
To install packages every time a notebook runs:
!python -m pip install # or
%pip install <pkgs>
!conda install -y
!mamba install -y
Like MAME, which is the emulator for the TI-83 Plus and other calculators hosted by this new Internet Archive project, Emscripten-forge builds WASM (WebAssembly) that runs in an application-sandboxed browser tab as the same user as other browser tab subprocesses.
TI-83 apps:
ACT Math Section app; /? TI-83 ACT app: https://www.google.com/search?q=ti83+act+app
Commodity markets with volatility on your monochrome LCD calculato with no WiFi. SimCity BuildIt has an online commodity marketplace and sims as part of the simulation game. "Category:TI-83&4 series Zilog Z80 games" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:TI-83%264_series_Zilo...
Computer Algebra System > Use in education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system#Use_in... :
> CAS-equipped calculators are not permitted on the ACT, the PLAN, and in some classrooms[15] though it may be permitted on all of College Board's calculator-permitted tests, including the SAT, some SAT Subject Tests and the AP Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, and Statistics exams.
Machine Learning for Fluid Dynamics Playlist
[Machine Learning for] "Fluid Dynamics" YouTube playlist. Steve Brunton (UW) https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMrJAkhIeNNQWO3ESiccZmPss...
Intercepting t.co links using DNS rewrites
That 9-hop shortening example is disgusting, I wonder if that could be alleviated by introducing some protocol:
1. Make all shortening services append a `This-is-a-shortening-service: true` header to all the responses they send.
2. When a link is added to a shortening service, check if the response from the link has the header above and resolve the destination, recursively.
awesome-url-shortener: https://github.com/738/awesome-url-shortener
/? shorturl api OpenAPI https://www.google.com/search?q=shorturl+api+openapi
- TinyURL OpenAPI: https://tinyurl.com/app/dev
- GH topic: url-shortener: https://github.com/topics/url-shortener
A https://schema.org/Thing may have zero or more https://schema.org/url and/or https://schema.org/identifier ; and then first the ?s subject URI that's specified with the `@id` property in JSONLD RDF.
You can add string, schema:Thing, or URI tags/labels with the https://schema.org/about property.
MusicLM: Generating music from text
I don't really understand why this approached is pushed for music. You can overpaint an image, but you can't do that with a song. Cutting an image to reintroduce coherence is easy too. For a song you need midi, or another symbolic representation. That was the approach of pop2piano (unfortunately it is limited to covers, not generating from scratch). And even if a song generated this is OK, listening to half an hour full of AI mistakes is really tiring. With a symbolic representation you could at least fix the mistakes if there is one good output.
I understand what you're saying, although it could be argued that at least for some types of image tasks one would prefer something like an SVG output with layers to make it easier to edit.
For music, I think it's partly an academic question of "can we do it" rather than trying to maximize immediate practical usefulness. There's already quite a bit of work on symbolic music generation (mostly MIDI), a lot of it quite competent, especially in more constrained domains like NES chiptunes or classical piano, so a full text-to-audio pipeline probably seemed a more interesting research problem.
And for a lot of use cases, where people might truly not care too much about tweaking the output to their liking, the generated audio might be good enough; the examples were pretty plausible to my ear, if somewhat lo-fi sounding (probably because it's operating at 24kHz, compared to the more standard 44-48kHz).
In the future a more hybrid approach probably makes sense for at least some applications, where MIDI is generated along with some way of specifying the timbre for each instrument (hopefully something better than general MIDI, though even that would be fun; not sure if it's been done). I'm sure that in the near we'll see a lot more work in the DAW and plugin space to have these kind of things built-in, but in a way that they can be edited by the user.
awesome-sheet-music lists a number of sheet music archives https://github.com/ad-si/awesome-sheet-music
Other libraries of (Royalty Free, Public Domain) sheet music:
Explainable artificial intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelli...
FWIU, Current LLMs can't yet do explainable AI well enough to satisfy the optional Attribution clause of e.g. Creative Commons licenses?
"Sufficiently Transformative" is the current general copyright burden according to precedent; Transformative use and fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
SQLAlchemy 2.0 Released
I would urge people who have had issues with the documentation to give the 2.0 documentation a try. Many aspects of it have been completely rewritten, both to correctly describe things in terms of the new APIs as well as to modernize a lot of old documentation that was written many years ago.
First off, SQLAlchemy's docs are pretty easy to get to, for a direct link just go to:
It's an esoteric URL I know! ;)
from there, docs that are new include:
- the Quickstart, so one can see in one quick page what SQLAlchemy usually looks like: https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/orm/quickstart.html
- the Unified Tutorial, which is a dive into basically every important concept across Core / ORM : https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/tutorial/index.html
- the ORM Querying guide, which is a "how to" for a full range of SQL generation: https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/orm/queryguide/index.html
it's still a lot to read of course but part of the idea of SQLAlchemy 2.0 was to create a straighter and more consistent narrative, while it continues to take on a very broad-based problem space. If you compare the docs to those of like, PostgreSQL or MySQL, those docs have a lot of sections and text too (vastly more). It's a big library.
From https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/dialects/ :
> Currently maintained external dialect projects for SQLAlchemy include: [...]
Is there a list of async [SQLA] DB adapters?
The SQLAlchemy 2.0 Release Docs: https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/20/orm/extensions/asyncio.htm...
Show HN: A script to test whether a program breaks without network access
"Chaos engineering" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
dastergon/awesome-chaos-engineering#notable-tools: https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-chaos-engineering#notab...
IIUC, MVVM apps can handle delayed messages - that sit in the outbox while waiting to reestablish network connectivity - better than apps without such layers.
Which mobile apps work during intermittent connectivity scenarios like disasters and disaster relief (where first priority typically is to get comms back online in order to support essential services (with GIF downloads and endless pull-to-refresh))?
Certified 100% AI-free organic content
> Published content will be later used to train subsequent models, and being able to distinguish AI from human input may be very valuable going forward
I find this to be a particularly interesting problem in this whole debacle.
Could we end up having AI quality trend downwards due to AI ingesting its own old outputs and reinforcing bad habits? I think it's a particular risk for text generation.
I've already run into scenarios where ChatGPT generated code that looked perfectly plausible, except for that the actual API used didn't really exist.
Now imagine a myriad fake blogs using ChatGPT under the hood to generate blog entries explaining how to solve often wanted problems, and that then being spidered and fed into ChatGPT 2.0. Such things could end up creating a downwards trend in quality, as more and more of such junk gets posted, absorbed into the model and amplified further.
I think image generation should be less vulnerable to this since all images need tagging to be useful, "ai generated" is a common tag that can be used to exclude reingesting old outputs, and also because with artwork precision doesn't matter so much. If people like the results, then it doesn't matter that much that something isn't drawn realistically.
As someone in SEO, I've been pretty disgusted by the desire for site owners to want to use AI-generated content. There are various opinions on this, of course, but I got into SEO out of interest in the "organic web" vs. everything being driven by ads.
Love the idea of having AI-Free declarations of content as it could / should help to differentiate organic content from generated content. It would be very interesting if companies and site owners wished to self-certify their site as organic with something like an /ai-free.txt.
I don't see the point. There's lots of old content out there that won't get tagged, so lacking the tag doesn't mean it's AI generated. Meanwhile people abusing AI for profit (eg, generating AI driven blogs to stick ads on them) wouldn't want to tag their sites in a way that might get them ignored.
And what are the consequences for lying?
Does use of a search engine violate the "No AI" covenant with oneself?
Variation on the Turning Test: prove that it's not a human claiming to be a computer.
Modeling premises and Meta-analysis are again necessary elements for critical reasoning about Sources and Methods and superpositions of Ignorance and Malice.
Maybe this could encourage the recreation of the original Yahoo! (If you don't remember, Yahoo! started out not as a search engine in the Google sense but as a collection of human curated links to websites about various topics)
I consider Wikipedia to be a massive curated set of information. It also includes a lot of references and links to additional good information / source materials. Companies try to get spin added and it's usually very well controlled. I worry that a lot of ai generated dreck will seep into Wikipedia, but I am hopeful the moderation will continue to function well.
List of Web directories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories ; DMOZ FTW
Distributed Version Control > Work model > Pull Request: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Pu...
sindresorhus/awesome: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome#contents
bayandin/awesome-awesomeness: https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
"Help compare Comment and Annotation services: moderation, spam, notifications, configurability" https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102
Re: fact checks, schema.org/ClaimReview, W3C Verifiable Claims, W3C Verifiable News & Epistemology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529140
W3C Web Annotations could contain (cryptographically-signed (optionally with a W3C DID)) Verifiable Claims; comments with signed Linked Data
An incomplete guide to stealth addresses
> Basic stealth addresses can be implemented fairly quickly today, and could be a significant boost to practical user privacy on Ethereum. They do require some work on the wallet side to support them
So how easy is it realistically? I hope it's not going to un-ergonomic like PGP where novices are sometimes seeing to be pasting their private key into e-mails and sending things in plaintext which should have been ciphertext, or otherwise leaking info.
I imagine you have to be really careful not to mess things up here.
Oh, there's WKD: Web Key Directory https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD#How_does_an_email_client_use_WKD....
gpg --homedir "$(mktemp -d)" --verbose --locate-keys your.email@example.org
https://example.org/.well-known/openpgpkey/hu/0t5sewh54rxz33fwmr8u6dy4bbz8itz2
WKD and HKP depend upon TLS and preshared CA certs (PKI or pinned certificates) in all forms AFAIU:
# HKP, HTTPS
gpg --recv-keys an.email@example.org
# WKD
gpg --locate-keys your.email@example.org
W3C DIDs are encodable into QR codes, too. And key hierarchy is optional with DIDs.
(Edit)
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#did-controller :
> DID Controller
> A DID controller is an entity that is authorized to make changes to a DID document. The process of authorizing a DID controller is defined by the DID method.
> The controller property is OPTIONAL. If present, the value MUST be a string or a set of strings that conform to the rules in 3.1 DID Syntax. The corresponding DID document(s) SHOULD contain verification relationships that explicitly permit the use of certain verification methods for specific purposes.
> When a controller property is present in a DID document, its value expresses one or more DIDs. Any verification methods contained in the DID documents for those DIDs SHOULD be accepted as authoritative, such that proofs that satisfy those verification methods are to be considered equivalent to proofs provided by the DID subject.
/? "Certificate Transparency" blockchain / dlt ... QKD, ... Web Of Trust and temp keys
What does Interledger Protocol say about these an in-band / in-channel signaling around transactions?
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Ctrl-F "SPSP"
> https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0009-simple-... :
> Relation to Other Protocols: SPSP is used for exchanging connection information before an ILP payment or data transfer is initiated
RFC 8905 specifies "The 'payto:' URI Scheme for Payments" and does support ILP addresses https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8905.html#name-tracking-pa... https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc8905/ :
> 7. Tracking Payment Target Types
> A registry of "Payto Payment Target Types" is described in Section 10. The registration policy for this registry is "First Come First Served", as described in [RFC8126]. When requesting new entries, careful consideration of the following criteria [...]
DID URIs are probably also already payto: URI-scheme compatible but not yet so registered?
ILP Addresses - v2.0.0 https://interledger.org/rfcs/0015-ilp-addresses/ :
> ILP addresses provide a way to route ILP packets to their intended destination through a series of hops, including any number of ILP Connectors. (This happens after address lookup using a higher-level protocol such as SPSP.) Addresses are not meant to be user-facing, but allow several ASCII characters for easy debugging.
Do Large Language Models learn world models or just surface statistics?
If they don't search for Tensor path integrals, for example, can any NN or symbolic solution ever be universally sufficient?
A generalized solution term expression for complex quantum logarithmic relations:
e**(w*(I**x)*(Pi**z))
Can [LLM XYZ] answer prompts like:
"How far is the straight-line distance from (3red, 2blue, 5green) to (1red, 5blue, 7green)?"
> - What are "Truthiness", Confidence Intervals and Error Propagation?
> - What is Convergence?
> - What does it mean for algorithmic outputs to converge given additional parametric noise?
> - "How certain are you that that is the correct answer?"
> - How does [ChatGPT] handle known-to-be or presumed-to-be unsolved math and physics problems?
> - "How do we create room-temperature superconductivity?"
"A solution for room temperature superconductivity using materials and energy from and on Earth"
> - "How will planetary orbital trajectories change in the n-body gravity problem if another dense probably interstellar mass passes through our local system?"
Where will a tracer ball be after time t in a fluid simulation ((super-)fluid NDEs Non-Differential Equations) of e.g. a vortex turbine next to a stream?
How do General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, Bernoulli's, Navier Stokes, and the Standard Model explain how to read and write to points in spacetime and how do we solve gravity?
Did I forget to cite myself (without a URL)? Notable enough for a citation it isn't.
"[Edu-sig] ChatGPT for py teaching" (2023) Editing Python Mailing List. (2023)
No, LLMs do not learn a sufficient world model for answering basic physics questions that aren't answered in the training corpus; and, AGI-strength AI is necessary for ethical reasoning given the liability in that application domain.
Hopefully, LLMs can at least fill in with possible terms like '4π' given other uncited training corpus data. LLMs are helpful for Evolutionary Algorithmic methods like mutation and crossover, but then straight-up ethical selection.
Ask [the LLM] to return a confidence estimate when it can't know the correct answer, as with hard and thus valuable e.g. physics problems. What tone of voice did Peabody take in explaining to Sherman, and what does an LLM emulate?
Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem
This is a great writeup by a central figure in Python packaging, and gets to the core of one of Python packaging's biggest strengths (and weaknesses): the PyPA is primarily an "open tent," with mostly independent (but somewhat standards-driven) development within it.
Pradyun's point about unnecessary competition rings especially true to me, and points to (IMO) a hard reality about where the ecosystem needs to go: at some point, there need to be some prescriptions about the one good tool to use for 99.9% of use cases, and with that will probably come some hurt feelings and disregarded technical opinions (including possibly mine!). But that's what needs to happen in order to produce a uniform tooling environment and UX.
The primary (probably build and) packaging system for a software application should probably support the maximum level of metadata sufficient for downstream repackaging tools.
Metadata for the ultimate software package should probably include a sufficient number of attributes in its declarative manifest:
Package namespace and name,
Per-file paths and Checksums, and at least one cryptographic signature from the original publisher. Whether the server has signed what was uploaded is irrelevant if it and the files within don't match a publisher signature at upload time?
And then there's the permissions metadata, the ACLs and context labels to support any or all of: SELinux, AppArmor, Flatpak, OpenSnitch, etc.. Neither Python packages nor conda packages nor RPM support specifying permissions and capabilities necessary for operation of downstream packages.
You can change the resolver, but the package metadata would need to include sufficient data elements for Python packaging to be the ideal uni-language package manager imho
Google Calls in Help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. Fight
It’s interesting that Google—the inventor of the “T” in GPT—is on red alert due to ChatGPT. And Google has a bunch of research in AI (see Dean’s recent blogpost [1]), so what gives with their lack of AI product/execution/strategy? Too scared to upend their existing cash cow maybe, aka innovator’s dilemma?
Also, it doesn’t inspire confidence in Pichai that Sergei and Brin were consulted about something that should be on the forefront of Google’s strategy. Maybe that’s too harsh but I just find all this surprising.
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/01/google-research-2022-beyon...
why woykd you say they are on "red alert"? Sounds like lazy investors pumping or dumping to me.
Google already has very large LLMs online for search and other applications.
A similar take on similar spin: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1614002846394892288
From April 2022, "Pathways Language Model (PaLM): Scaling to 540 Billion Parameters for Breakthrough Performance" https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/04/pathways-language-model-pa... :
> In recent years, large neural networks trained for language understanding and generation have achieved impressive results across a wide range of tasks. GPT-3 first showed that large language models (LLMs) can be used for few-shot learning and can achieve impressive results without large-scale task-specific data collection or model parameter updating. More recent LLMs, such as GLaM, LaMDA, Gopher, and Megatron-Turing NLG, achieved state-of-the-art few-shot results on many tasks by scaling model size, using sparsely activated modules, and training on larger datasets from more diverse sources. Yet much work remains in understanding the capabilities that emerge with few-shot learning as we push the limits of model scale.
> […] More recent LLMs, such as GLaM, LaMDA, Gopher, and Megatron-Turing NLG, achieved [SOTA] few-shot results on many tasks by scaling model size, using sparsely activated modules, and training on larger datasets from more diverse sources. Yet much work remains [for few-shot LLMs] /2
DeepMind Dreamerv3 is more advanced than all the LLMs.
I don’t think the issue of Google is a lack of advanced AI technology but the transfer and realization of products. So many Google’s products are half-backed, only half-heartedly developed and then be buried at the end. For a giant like Google, they must be stuck in a rut and to get free need all the help they can get. If they continue the business as usual, I afraid they will experience a never-seen before landslide. I believe calling back the founders at this critical time is the right move.
I disagree with your assessment of their comparative performance.
"Beyond Tabula Rasa: Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning" https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/beyond-tabula-rasa-reincar... :
> Furthermore, the inefficiency of tabula rasa RL research can exclude many researchers from tackling computationally-demanding problems. For example, the quintessential benchmark of training a deep RL agent on 50+ Atari 2600 games in ALE for 200M frames (the standard protocol) requires 1,000+ GPU days. As deep RL moves towards more complex and challenging problems, the computational barrier to entry in RL research will likely become even higher.
> To address the inefficiencies of tabula rasa RL, we present “Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation To Accelerate Progress” at NeurIPS 2022. Here, we propose an alternative approach to RL research, where prior computational work, such as learned models, policies, logged data, etc., is reused or transferred between design iterations of an RL agent or from one agent to another. While some sub-areas of RL leverage prior computation, most RL agents are still largely trained from scratch. Until now, there has been no broader effort to leverage prior computational work for the training workflow in RL research. We have also released our code and trained agents to enable researchers to build on this work.
Feed-Forward with Prompt Engineering is like RL; which prompt elements should remain given objective or subjective error?
On-demand electrical control of spin qubits (2023)
"On-demand electrical control of spin qubits" (2023) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01280-4
> Once called a ‘classically non-describable two-valuedness’ by Pauli, the electron spin forms a qubit that is naturally robust to electric fluctuations. Paradoxically, a common control strategy is the integration of micromagnets to enhance the coupling between spins and electric fields, which, in turn, hampers noise immunity and adds architectural complexity. Here we exploit a switchable interaction between spins and orbital motion of electrons in silicon quantum dots, without a micromagnet. The weak effects of relativistic spin–orbit interaction in silicon are enhanced, leading to a speed up in Rabi frequency by a factor of up to 650 by controlling the energy quantization of electrons in the nanostructure. Fast electrical control is demonstrated in multiple devices and electronic configurations. Using the electrical drive, we achieve a coherence time T2,Hahn ≈ 50 μs, fast single-qubit gates with Tπ/2 = 3 ns and gate fidelities of 99.93%, probed by randomized benchmarking. High-performance all-electrical control improves the prospects for scalable silicon quantum computing. High-performance all-electrical control is a prerequisite for scalable silicon quantum computing. The switchable interaction between spins and orbital motion of electrons in silicon quantum dots now enables the electrical control of a spin qubit with high fidelity and speed, without the need for integrating a micromagnet.
Is this Quantum of Silicon; or Quantum Dots on Silicon?
Used to be that quantum dots were for the the next level display tech beyond OLED, which doesn't require magnets either.
"Rowhammer for qubits: is it possible?" https://www.reddit.com/r/quantum/comments/7osud4/rowhammer_f... and its downstream mentions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294577
"Bell's inequality violation with spins in silicon" (2015) https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03112
I had heard that Bell's actually means that there is a high error rate in transmitting quantum states - 60%, I thought Wikipedia had said - through entanglement relations with physical descriptions. Doesn't entangled satellite communication violate Bell's, too?
Maybe call it and emissions a "Hot Tub Time Machine", eh?
Reverse engineering a neural network's clever solution to binary addition
The trick of performing binary addition by using analog voltages was used in the IAS family of computers (1952), designed by John von Neumann. It implemented a full adder by converting two input bits and a carry in bit into voltages that were summed. Vacuum tubes converted the analog voltage back into bits by using a threshold to generate the carry-out and more complex thresholds to generate the sum-out bit.
Nifty, makes one wonder if logarithmic or sigmoid functions for ML could be done using this method. Especially as we approach the node size limit, perhaps dealing with fuzzy analog will become more valuable.
There are a few startups making analog ML compute. Mythic & Aspinity for example
https://www.eetimes.com/aspinity-puts-neural-networks-back-t...
Veritasium has a bit of an video on Mythic - Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing) - https://youtu.be/GVsUOuSjvcg
From "Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors and Computing in 1833" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32888210 and then "Qubit: Quantum register: Qudits and qutrits" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983110:
>>> The following is an incomplete list of physical implementations of qubits, and the choices of basis are by convention only: [...] Qubit#Physical_implementations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Physical_implementations
> - note the "electrons" row of the table
According to this Table on wikipedia, it's possible to use electron charge (instead of 'spin') to do Quantum Logic with Qubits.
How is that doing quantum logical computations with electron charge different from from what e.g. Cirq or Tequila do (optionally with simulated noise to simulate the Quantum Computer Engineering hardware)?
FWIU, analog and digital component qualities are not within sufficient tolerance to do precise analog computation? (Though that's probably debatable for certain applications at least, but not for general purpose computing architectures?) That is, while you can build adders out of voltage potentials quantified more specifically than 0 or 1, you might shouldn't without sufficient component spec tolerances because noise and thus error.
IMHO, Turing Tumble and Spintronics are neat analog computer games.
(Are Qubits, by Church-Turing-Deutsch, sufficient to; 1) simuluate arbitrary quantum physical systems; or 2) run quantum logical simulations as circuits with low error due to high coherence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93... )
>> See also: "Quantum logic gate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate
Analog computers > Electronic analog computers aren't Electronic digital computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer#Electronic_ana...
Heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future
In a house I own in Melbourne, Australia, I just replaced an old gas central heating system with 3 new top of the line Daikin mini split heat pumps. The new units can heat the entire house for the same amount of electrical energy that was used to run the FAN in the old gas unit. They are crazy efficient.
Ducts are dead.
The Daikin Alira X is the gold-plated option and cost $8k AUD for 2x2.5kw and 1x7.1kw units including installation. Payback time is about 3 years. The system is oversized, but enables excellent zoning and of course provides cooling which is a must on 40C/104F days.
Why do they seem to be so much more expensive in the US?
> Ducts are dead.
Ducts are still needed to circulate air, especially if you want to remove stale air (e.g., bathrooms, kitchen) and bring in (filtered) fresh air (to bedrooms).
Not being snarky but why don't you just open the window for that?
I have a CO2 detector that I believe is a reasonable proxy for stale air. When it goes above 1000 I simply open the windows. By the time I remember to close the windows the reading is almost always below 500.
Where I live, it can get very cold. Not always very efficient to open windows for 5 months out of the year.
A great option for keeping CO2 levels down in a house is with an HRV (or ERV) [1] that will heat the fresh air coming in to cycle it throughout the house.
From the ERV/HRV (Energy Recovery Ventilation / Heat Recovery Ventilation) wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation#Ty... :
> During the warmer seasons, an ERV system pre-cools and dehumidifies; During cooler seasons the system humidifies and pre-heats.[1] An ERV system helps HVAC design meet ventilation and energy standards (e.g., ASHRAE), improves indoor air quality and reduces total HVAC equipment capacity, thereby reducing energy consumption.
> ERV systems enable an HVAC system to maintain a 40-50% indoor relative humidity, essentially in all conditions. ERV's must use power for a blower to overcome the pressure drop in the system, hence incurring a slight energy demand.
In Jan 2023, the ERV wikipedia article has a 'Table of Energy recovery devices by Types of transfer supported': Total and Sensible :
> [ Total & Sensible transfer: Rotary enthalpy wheel, Fixed Plate ]
> [ Sensible transfer only: Heat pipe, Run around coil, Thermosiphon, Twin Towers ]
Latent heat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_heat :
> In contrast to latent heat, sensible heat is energy transferred as heat, with a resultant temperature change in a body.
Sensible heat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensible_heat
There's a broader Category:Energy_recovery page which includes heat pumps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Energy_recovery
Are heat pumps more efficient than ERVs? Do heat pumps handle relative humidify in the same way as ERVs?:
IME you don't use an ERV alone. You'd use it _with_ a Heat Pump. The ERV is all about transferring heat from one airstream to another. It's _not_ a device that manages indoor temperatures though, just recovers some of the latent energy in the air. In the process it's also managing humidity mainly as a by-product. The humidification properties of the ERV allow you to run the Heat Pump in a more efficient manner. I have an HVAC geek friend who explained the whole process, but essentially (in non physics/fluid dynamics[?] terminology), if the Heat Pump doesn't need to dehumidify air it can operate more efficiently.
How Nvidia’s CUDA Monopoly in Machine Learning Is Breaking
It is quite weird to talk about all the frameworks which are built on top of CUDA eventually, but not talking about Rocm or OpenCL.
OpenAI's Triton compiles down to CUDA atm (if I read their github right), and only supports Nvidia GPUs.
PyTorch 2.0's installation page only mentions CPU and CUDA targets, therefor it's effectively all Nvidia GPUs.
While all the frameworks and abstractions could offer other back-ends in theory the story of anything ML related on the other big name in the industry, AMD, is still poor.
If anybody looses business because of bad decisions it is AMD, not Nvidia, who lead the whole industry. I am not convinced that anything will change in the near future.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32904285 re: AMD ROcm, HIPIFY, :
> AMD ROcm supports Pytorch, TensorFlow, MlOpen, rocBLAS on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs: https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learni... [...]
> ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY :
>> hipify-clang is a clang-based tool for translating CUDA sources into HIP sources. It translates CUDA source into an abstract syntax tree, which is traversed by transformation matchers. After applying all the matchers, the output HIP source is produced. [...]
From https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/clang-ocl :
> RadeonOpenCompute/OpenCL compilation with clang compiler
A better overview from the docs: "Machine Learning and High Performance Computing Software Stack for AMD GPU" https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Installation_Guide/Softwa...
Large language models as simulated economic agents (2022) [pdf]
I love it. Instead of (a) running mathematical experiments that model human beings as utility-maximizing agents in a highly-simplified toy economy (easy and cheap, but unrealistic), or (b) running large-scale social experiments on actual human beings (more realistic, but hard and expensive), the authors propose (c) running large-scale experiments on large language models (LLMs) trained to respond, i.e., behave, like human beings. Recent LLMs seem to model human beings well enough for it!
Abstract:
> Newly-developed large language models (LLM)—because of how they are trained and designed—are implicit computational models of humans—a homo silicus. These models can be used the same way economists use homo economicus: they can be given endowments, information, preferences, and so on and then their behavior can be explored in scenarios via simulation. I demonstrate this approach using OpenAI’s GPT3 with experiments derived from Charness and Rabin (2002), Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1986) and Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988). The findings are qualitatively similar to the original results, but it is also trivially easy to try variations that offer fresh insights. Departing from the traditional laboratory paradigm, I also create a hiring scenario where an employer faces applicants that differ in experience and wage ask and then analyze how a minimum wage affects realized wages and the extent of labor-labor substitution.
Attempting to draw any kind of conclusions about the real world and human behaviour from a chatbot. Can't decide if this is hilarious or disturbing.
It is so implausible that the training process that creates LLMs might learn features of human behavior that could then be uncovered via experimentation? I showed, empirically, that one can replicate several findings in behavioral economics with AI agents. Perhaps the model "knows" how to behave from these papers, but I think the more plausible interpretation is that it learned about human preferences (against price gouging, status quo bias, & so on) from its training. As such, it seems quite likely that there are other latent behaviors captured by LLMs and yet to be discovered.
> As such, it seems quite likely that there are other latent behaviors captured by LLMs and yet to be discovered.
>> What NN topology can learn a quantum harmonic model?
Can any LLM do n-body gravity? What does it say when it doesn't know; doesn't have confidence in estimates?
>> Quantum harmonic oscillators have also found application in modeling financial markets. Quantum harmonic oscillator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator
"Modeling stock return distributions with a quantum harmonic oscillator" (2018) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/120/380...
... Nudge, nudge.
Behavioral economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1614123454642487296
Virtual economies do afford certain opportunities for economic experiments.
Homelab analog telephone exchange
You might want to consider looking at Asterisk, the open source PBX. They have a list of analog cards that they support.
Asterisk (PBX) > Derived products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_(PBX)
"What is the technology behind Sangoma Meet?" https://help.sangoma.com/community/s/article/What-is-the-tec...
> Sangoma Meet is based on WebRTC, which provides video conferencing and is supported by most of the major web browsers today.
> Our software stack is built upon several open source tools, including Jitsi Meet, FreeSWITCH™, HAProxy, Prometheus, Grafana, collectd, and other tools used for provisioning, deploying and managing the service.
FWIU, Sangoma Talk includes the Sangoma Meet functionality: https://www.sangoma.com/products/communications-services/tea...
> Mobile Soft Client: Take your company phone extension with you anywhere using a mobile soft client. Forward calls from the office, receive voicemails, start a video meeting, and much more! When you call your customers or clients through the Sangoma Talk app, they will see your office phone number, which allows you to maintain your personal device privacy. Available for iOS & Android devices.
GVoice (originally GrandCentral) can't do voice or video call transfer to the mobile soft client app, FWIU
A 116kb WASM of Blink that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser
I believe it's for some Linux binaries, statically compiled. Having a portable subset of Linux is pretty cool though.
Maybe this turns into an anti-distro, a collection of portable apps not specific to a Linux distro? (Or Linux, even.)
From https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite/issues/26 :
> Micropip or Mambalite or picomamba or Zig.
> "Better integration with conda/conda-forge for building packages" [pyodide/pyodide#795]( https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/795)
> Emscripten-forge > Adding packages: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes#adding-packages
> - https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...
> -- emscripten-forge/recipes/blob/main/recipes/recipes_emscripten/picomamba/recipe.yaml: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/blob/main/recipe...
> --- mamba-org/picomamba: https://github.com/mamba-org/picomamba
From emscripten-forge/recipes https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes :
> Build wasm/emscripten packages with conda/mamba/boa. This repository consists of recipes for conda packages for emscripten. Most of the recipes have been ported from pyodide.
> While we already have a lot of packages built, this is still a big work in progress.
SQLite Wasm in the browser backed by the Origin Private File System
I think this will be great for extensions. Currently the only solid choice is to use the dead simple storage.local which only allows to retrieve things by ID.
There's one problem though, this new API is for the web, so the nature of this storage is temporary - obviously the user must be able to clear it when clearing site data and this what makes it currently an unviable solution for a persistent extensions data storage. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=138321...
I’m getting Flash flashbacks. Flash apps had filesystem access in a designated area, with some amount of user control, that is not easily wiped from the browser; Flash games used that for saves and data. Years after the demise of Flash, the web platform is still catching up.
It's different though, extensions are like local apps and deserve persistent storage, while you are talking about how Flash was being used by remote sources. Also my proposed approach is that this data would be wiped when the extension is removed from the browser - which is what happens for storage.local
Some way to indicate which "WASM contexts" (?) have utilized how much disk space would be great for open source multiple implementations not-Flash, too.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32953286 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-32950199 :
> - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tab tabs according to their relative resource utilization
And then that tabs are (sandboxed) subprocesses running as the same user though.
Containers may have unique SELinux MCS labels, and browser tab processes probably should too.
containers/container-selinux: https://github.com/containers/container-selinux
https://github.com/kai5263499/awesome-container-security/iss...
> - [ ] ENH,SEC: Browsers: specify per-tab/per-domain resource quotas: CPU, RAM, Disk, [GPU, TPU, QPU] (Linux: cgroups,)
Like Flash
The i3-gaps project has been merged with i3
Hi. I'm the maintainer of i3-gaps and also a maintainer for i3.
The story of this merge is not only several years long, but a true success story in OSS in my eyes.
I took on i3-gaps by taking an existing patch and rebasing it to the latest i3 HEAD. From there it became popular and I took on the maintainership, eventually contributing to i3 itself and finally becoming a maintainer there as well.
Whilst originally gaps were considered an "anti feature" for i3, years ago we already decided that we'd accept adding gaps into i3. Clearly the fork was popular, and as someone else pointed out here as well, the Wayland "port" of i3, sway, added gaps from the beginning on with great success.
However, the original gaps patch was focused on being small and easy to maintain. It caused a few issues and had some drawbacks. We made it a condition that porting gaps into i3 would have to resolve these issues. Alas, this could've meant a lot of work that no one took on for the years to follow.
Recently, however, the maintainers of i3 got together (a chance to meet arose randomly). During that meeting we decided that it'd be better to just merge the fork and improve it later. And as it happened, Michael, the author and main maintainer of i3, did all that work during the port as well.
What resulted is the end of almost a decade of i3-gaps, and a much better implementation thereof. I'm incredibly happy to see this happen after all this time, and a big shoutout to Michael here for all that work.
Edit: Hadn't realized Michael was commenting here already. I guess leaving the background and story from my side of things doesn't hurt regardless.
What do you think about getting alt-tab support in there? Here to say this: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/i...
You want to use i3 to collapse focus management into a single temporal dimension?
I'll die defending your right to do so, but dear god your taste is atrocious. It's like you finally got out of prison and decided to decorate your bedroom window with iron bars.
In every window manager that supports it, alt tab does two things.
Alt tab with a long hold on alt lets you select another window, albeit from a linear list as you describe, by cycling through with tab and shift-tab.
Quickly typing alt-tab now cycles between the window you came from and the window you just selected. That’s the super useful value of the feature.
Is there an i3 command to (a) leap to another window from a selection and (b) leap back and forth between the window you came from and the window you just chose?
> Is there an i3 command to (a) leap to another window from a selection and (b) leap back and forth between the window you came from and the window you just chose?
Not for windows as far as I know, but for workspaces, yes: https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#back_and_forth https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#workspace_auto_back_and...
For (a) I've been using rofi. I bound a key to open its window switcher which gives me a searchable list of all open windows. There are quite a few other options: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/I3#Jump_to_open_window
For (b) I don't know what the best option is but I see some people posting their scripts in this thread: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/838 I think I would bind some keys to mark and then focus by mark if I wanted to do this instead of having a toggle.
So far as I know, the only way to get that functionality is to put the windows next to each other and to navigate them spatially (or to write a script that does it and bind that script to alt+tab).
But grouping windows logically based on how they're used has always just felt right, so I've never really considered that you want to keep track of the order in which windows were previously selected (using alt-tab to navigate even just three or four windows can be quite a trick). It always seemed like a necessary evil since floating-only window managers can't handle the kind of spatial focus-navigation that i3 does.
Do you happen to know an alt tab that just uses the currently visible desktops ? ( I have two monitors, and want to alt-tab between windows without finding the old ones hidden)
---
Also, I feel bad using this thread for feature requests/questions. Lovely work guys, and I am very grateful!
Do you mean currently visible desktops or windows? https://github.com/sagb/alttab is the utility of my choice to get what I wanted.
Show HN: Futurecoder – A free interactive Python course for coding beginners
Some highlights:
- 100% free and open source (https://github.com/alexmojaki/futurecoder), no ads or paid content.
- No account required at any point. You can start instantly. (You can create an account if you want to save your progress online and across devices. Your email is only used for password resets)
- 3 integrated debuggers can be started with one click to show what your code is doing in different ways.
- Enhanced tracebacks make errors easy to understand.
- Useful for anyone: You can have the above without having to look at the course. IDE mode (https://futurecoder.io/course/#ide) gives you an instant scratchpad to write and debug code similar to repl.it.
- Completely interactive course: run code at every step which is checked automatically, keeping you engaged and learning by doing.
- Every exercise has many small optional hints to give you just the information you need to figure it out and no more.
- When the hints run out and you're still stuck, there are 2 ways to gradually reveal a solution so you can still apply your mind and make progress.
- Advice for common mistakes: customised linting for beginners and exercise-specific checks to keep you on track.
- Construct a question that will be well-received on sites like StackOverflow: https://futurecoder.io/course/#question
- Also available in French (https://fr.futurecoder.io/), Tamil (https://ta.futurecoder.io/), and Spanish (https://es-latam.futurecoder.io/). Note that these translations are slightly behind the English version, so the sites themselves are too as a result. If you're interested, help with translation would be greatly appreciated! Translation to Chinese and Portuguese is also half complete, and any other languages are welcome.
- Runs in the browser using Pyodide (https://pyodide.org/). No servers. Stores user data in firebase.
- Progressive Web App (PWA) that can be installed from the browser and used offline.
-----------
A frequent question is how does futurecoder compare to Codecademy? Codeacademy has some drawbacks:
- No interactive shell/REPL/console
- No debuggers
- Basic error tracebacks not suitable for beginners
- No stdin, i.e. no input() so you can't write interactive programs, and no pdb.
- No gradual guidance when you're stuck. You can get one big hint, then the full solution in one go. This is not effective for learners having difficulty.
- Still on Python 3.6 (futurecoder is on 3.10)
I am obviously biased, but I truly believe futurecoder is the best resource for adult beginners. The focus on debugging tools, improved error messages, and hints empowers learners to tackle carefully balanced challenges. The experience of learning feels totally different from other courses, which is why I claim that if someone wants to start learning how to code, futurecoder is the best recommendation you can make.
This looks really good, going through the first couple of tasks it seems well considered.
I'm introducing my 8yo daughter to programming at the moment, she is beginning to play around with Scratch. I'm keeping my eye out some something closer to proper coding though. I think this may be a little too far at the moment, but I may try her out on it with me sitting next to her and see how she gets on!
Is there any way for users to construct their own multiple stage tutorials? (It looks like we can do single questions)
Currently you have the console output, have you considered having a canvas/bitmap output that could be targeted with the various Python drawing and image manipulation apis?
Incredibly generous of you to make it open source!
> Is there any way for users to construct their own multiple stage tutorials?
I really hope some kind of GUI to do that can exist one day, but it's definitely a complicated feature that I'd need help from contributors to build. Same for graphical output.
> (It looks like we can do single questions)
I think you're talking about the question wizard. That's for helping people to write good quality questions about their own struggles to post on StackOverflow and similar sites. It's not for making 'challenges' for others to solve.
> Incredibly generous of you to make it open source!
Thank you! I'm really trying to improve the state of education and make the world a better place. I hope that in addition to directly helping users, I can inspire other educators, raise the bar, and help them build similar products. To this end, futurecoder is powered by many open source libraries that I've created which are designed to also be useful in their own right:
Debuggers: these are integrated in the site but also usable in any environment:
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/birdseye
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/snoop
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/cheap_repr (not a debugger, but used by the above two as well as directly by futurecoder)
Tracebacks:
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/stack_data (this is also what powers the new IPython tracebacks)
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/executing (allows highlighting the exact spot where the error occurred, but also enables loads of other magical applications)
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/pure_eval
You can see a nicer presentation (with pictures) of the above as well as other projects of mine on my profile https://github.com/alexmojaki
Libraries which I specifically extracted from futurecoder to help build another similar educational site https://papyros.dodona.be/?locale=en (which does have a canvas output, at least for matplotlib):
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/sync-message (allows synchronous communication with web workers to make input() work properly)
- https://github.com/alexmojaki/comsync
Thanks! FWICS, futurecoder (and JupyterLite) may be the best way to run `print("hello world!")` in Python on Chromebooks for Education and Chromebooks with Family Link which don't have VMs or Containers ((!) which we rely upon on the server side to host container web shells like e.g. Google Colab and GitHub Codespaces (which aren't available for kids < 13) and cocalc-docker and ml-tooling/ml-workspace and kaggle/docker-python and https://kaggle.com/learn )
Also looked at codesters. quobit/awesome-python-in-education: https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education
Looks like `Ctrl-Enter` works, just like jupyter/vscode.
iodide-project/iodide > "Compatibility with 'percent' notebook format" which works with VScode, Spyder, pycharm, https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide/issues/2942:
# %%
import sympy as sy
import numpy as np
import scipy as sp
import pandas as pd
# %%
print("hello")
# %%
print("world")
Tell HN: Vim users, `:x` is like `:wq` but writes only when changes are made
`:x` leaves the modification time of files untouched if nothing was changed.
:help :x
Like ":wq", but write only when changes have been made.I learned to do `:wq` after I learned that `:X` encrypts your file. When typing without really paying attention to the screen, I've twice encrypted my file with password like `cd tmp`, then saved the config file, breaking my system.
After that, I switched to `:wq` (and sometimes `:w` `:q`) which is much safer against over-typing.
Thanks for bringing this up.
I'm toying with either disabling it,
cmap X <Nop>
cmap X x
2. Does anyone know a better way to turn off the `:X` encryption option?
Sadly, having to remap definitely dulls the shine of `:x`.
Mapping to 'x' is dangerous since on a system where you don't have your vimrc you'll get the original behavior of 'X'. Ideally you'd map 'X' to deliver a small electric shock. ;-)
cmap X x
:help X
Which is still to prompt? A person could take their chances.
Besides, wouldn't that form of intentionally aversive conditioning actually boost the learning rate and create hyperassociations to the behavior your're attempting to stimulus extinct or just learn over?
Ask HN: Is there academic research on software fragility?
I keep finding articles that more or less talk about this but not some serious research on the topic. Do someone have a few pointers?
Edit: to clarify what I mean by fragility, it's how complex software, when changed, is likely to break with unexpected bugs, i.e., fixing a bug causes more.
How software changes over time?
API versioning, API deprecation
Code bloat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_bloat#
"Category:Software maintenance" costs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_maintenance
Pleasing a different audience with fewer, simpler features
Lack of acceptance tests to detect regressions
Regression testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_testing :
> Regression testing (rarely, non-regression testing [1]) is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs as expected after a change. [2] If not, that would be called a regression.
Fragile -> Software brittleness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_brittleness
Thanks I will check out those references mentioned by wikipedia and also include the term software brittleness in my searches. It seems related even if maybe not exactly my goal
Yeah IDK if that one usage on Wikipedia is consistent:
> [Regression testing > Background] Sometimes re-emergence occurs because a fix gets lost through poor revision control practices (or simple human error in revision control). Often, a fix for a problem will be "fragile" in that it fixes the problem in the narrow case where it was first observed but not in more general cases which may arise over the lifetime of the software. Frequently, a fix for a problem in one area inadvertently causes a software bug in another area.
Seattle Public Schools sues TikTok, YouTube, Instagram over youth mental health
.. as a Seattle dad .. I fucking love this awkward yet clearly precedent-setting case. I know most of the board and the majority of us are fed up and taking the power we have to task and accountability. This has been in the works for over four years and we know the end game: new laws, adopted by other cities and states. .. it’s been a clearly focused project for over 4 years now. One of my friends is on the board. I knew it was coming Q1 2023 and glad they stayed on task. A bevy of mental health experts are core to this - so due diligence. I don’t know the layout of the legal team, but was told they have put this thru the ringer - the goal has always been a legal precedent, then actual legislation then adopted by other entities as well. The Portland School District has a parallel lawsuit as well. The pushback will be WELL propagandized and vilified. I can only imagine what garbage FOX will spew.
The lawsuit is going to be dismissed due to lack of standing.
.. it’s been a clearly focused project for over 4 years now. A colleague is on the board..A bevy of mental health experts are core to this - so due diligence. I don’t know the layout of the legal team, but was told they have put this thru the ringer - the goal has always been a legal precedent, then actual legislation, then adoption by other entities as well. The Portland School District has a parallel lawsuit as well on the tails of ours.
.. I suggest this light reading: https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=7.48
Is there a specific law that these firms are supposed to have violated? (Does there need to be? I am not a lawyer.)
Does the school district have standing to sue on behalf of the students? (Is the injury that they pay more for mental health services for students?)
I’m genuinely curious. There’s a surface analogy to the cases against opioid manufacturers and distributors, but those are controlled substances whereas YouTube is clearly not.
There isn’t even a clear causal effect of the from YouTube -> depression, IMO. Research on this has been quite low quality.
And what about the role of the parents who are the owners of the phones on which their children run TikTok?
Again genuine curiosity here, not trying to be a jerk.
The geek wire article mentions that they are referring to the public nuisance law.
Probably would have been more cost effective to have worked with Amazon in Seattle on the Kids launcher on the Fire OS fork of Android (the one that merges the App Store and Launcher for the kids).
It's not safe to allow school administrators to jam and deny students' (possibly distracting) communications at least on their personal devices, eh?
Perhaps students could voluntarily submit to an App Launcher for focusing on school that deprioritizes content streams that haven't been made educational while attending unpaid conpulsory education programs under threat of prosecution for truancy, not nuisance.
Non- FireOS Android forks have the "Digital Wellbeing" tools for helping oneself focus despite persistent distractions that will always exist IRL.
Mechanical circuits: electronics without electricity [video]
Life is like a box of terrible analogies. - Oscar Wilde
This analogy is quite interesting.
Each element and connector are actually equivalents of circuit loops that are spliced together when you are connecting them.
So a spinotronics diode works more like a loop of "diode wire" out of which you can make multiple diodes by splicing other connectors and elements into it.
That's why you can make FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER with just two spinotronic "diodes".
Electrons are described as fluids when there is superconductivity.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity :
> Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. [1][2] An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.
FWIU, an electric current pattern described as EM hertz waves (e.g. as sinusoids) is practically persisted at Lagrangian points and in nonterminal, non-intersecting Lorentz curve paths at least?
IRL electronic components waste energy as heat like steaming, over-pressurized water towers. And erasing bits releases heat instead of dropping the 1 onto the negative or ground "return path"
I agree that Spintronics is a great game for mechanical circuits, which are in certain sufficient ways like electronic circuits, which can't persist qubits for any reasonable unit of time.
Python malware starting to employ anti-debug techniques
I’m wonder if there is room for a security model based around “escrow builds”.
Imagine if PyPi could take pure source code, and run a standardized wheel build for you. That pipeline would include running security linters on the source. Then you can install the escrow version of the artifact instead of the one produced by the project maintainers.
You can even have a capability model - most installers should not need to run onbuild/oninstall hooks. So by default don’t grant that.
This sidesteps a bunch of supply-chain attacks. The cost is that there is some labor required to maintain these escrow pipelines.
With modern build tools I think this might not be unworkable, particularly given that small libraries would be incentivized to adopt standardized structures if it means they get the “green padlock” equivalent.
Libraries that genuinely have special needs like numpy could always go outside this system, and have a “be careful where you install this package from” warning. But most libraries simply have no need for the machinery being exploited here.
Signed, Reproducible builds from source off a trusted build farm are possible with conda-forge, emscripten-forge, Fedora COPR, and OpenSUSE OBS Open Build System https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/795#issuecomment-1...
What does it mean for a package to have been signed with the key granted to the CI build server?
Does a Release Manager (or primary maintainer) again sign what the build farm produced once? What sort of consensus on PR approval and build output justifies use of the build artifact signing key granted to a CI build server?
How open are the build farm and signed package repo and pubkey server configurations? https://github.com/dev-sec https://pulpproject.org/content-plugins/
The Reproducible Builds project aims to make it possible to not need to trust your build machines, perhaps PyPI could use that approach.
"Did the tests pass" for that signed Reproducible build?
Conda > Adding packages > Running unit tests: https://conda-forge.org/docs/maintainer/adding_pkgs.html#run...
From https://github.com/thonny/thonny/issues/2181 :
> * https://conda-forge.org/docs/maintainer/updating_pkgs.html
> Pushing to regro-cf-autotick-bot branch¶ When a new version of a package is released on PyPI/CRAN/.., we have a bot that automatically creates version updates for the feedstock. In most cases you can simply merge this PR and it should include all changes. When certain things have changed upstream, e.g. the dependencies, you will still have to do changes to the created PR. As feedstock maintainer, you don’t have to create a new PR for that but can simply push to the branch the bot created. There are two alternatives […]
nektos/act is one way to run a github-actions.yml build definition locally; without CI (e.g. GitLab Runner, which requires ~--privileged access to the docker/Podman socket) to check whether you get the exact same build artifacts as the CI build farm https://github.com/nektos/act
A Multi-stage Dockerfile has multiple FROM instructions: you can build 1) a container for running the build which has build essentials like a compiler (GCC, LLVM) and packaging tools and keys; and 2) COPY the build artifact (probably one or more signed software packages) --from the build stage container to a container which appropriately lacks a compiler for production. https://www.google.com/search?q=multi+stage+Dockerfile
Are there guidelines for excluding entropy like the commit hash and build time so that the artifact hashes are exactly the same; are reproducible on my machine, too?
Adding design-by-contract conditions to C++ via a GCC plugin
What's the advantage of invariants over unit testing? Seems like there must be lot of overhead at runtime.
>I was ending up with garbage, and not realizing it until I had visualized it with Graphviz!
>Imagine if we had invariants that we could assert after every property change to the tree.
Have you tried writing unit tests? What didn't work about them that you decided to try invariants?
icontract is one implementation of Design by Contract for Python; which is also like Eiffel, which is considered ~the origin of DbC. icontract is fancier than compile-time macros can be. In addition to Invariant checking at runtime, icontract supports inheritance-aware runtime preconditions and postconditions to for example check types and value constraints. Here are the icontract Usage docs: https://icontract.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#invari...
For unit testing, there's icontract-hypothesis; with the Preconditions and Postconditions delineated by e.g. decorators, it's possible to generate many of the fuzz tests from the additional Design by Contract structure of the source.
From https://github.com/mristin/icontract-hypothesis :
> icontract-hypothesis combines design-by-contract with automatic testing.
> It is an integration between icontract library for design-by-contract and Hypothesis library for property-based testing.
> The result is a powerful combination that allows you to automatically test your code. Instead of writing manually the Hypothesis search strategies for a function, icontract-hypothesis infers them based on the function’s [sic] precondition
Paper-thin solar cell can turn any surface into a power source
> These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.
Because they are so thin and lightweight, these solar cells can be laminated onto many different surfaces. For instance, they could be integrated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea, adhered onto tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster recovery operations, or applied onto the wings of drones to extend their flying range. This lightweight solar technology can be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation needs.
> [...] They found an ideal material — a composite fabric that weighs only 13 grams per square meter, commercially known as Dyneema
They also make ultralight backpacking backpacks out of Dyneema, but without the UV-curable glue.
> […] “A typical rooftop solar installation in Massachusetts is about 8,000 watts. To generate that same amount of power, our fabric photovoltaics would only add about 20 kilograms (44 pounds) to the roof of a house,” he says
Paper: “Printed Organic Photovoltaic Modules on Transferable Ultra-thin Substrates as Additive Power Sources” (2022) https://doi.org/10.1002/smtd.202200940
Solar energy can now be stored for up to 18 years, say scientists
> Long-term storage of the energy they generate is another matter. The solar energy system created at Chalmers back in 2017 is known as ‘MOST’: Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage Systems.
/? MOST Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage https://www.google.com/search?q=MOST%3A+Molecular+Solar+Ther... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=MOS...
> The technology is based on a specially designed molecule of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that changes shape when it comes into contact with sunlight.
> It shape-shifts into an ‘energy-rich isomer’ - a molecule made up of the same atoms but arranged together in a different way. The isomer can then be stored in liquid form for later use when needed, such as at night or in the depths of winter.
> A catalyst releases the saved energy as heat while returning the molecule to its original shape, ready to be used again.
> Over the years, researchers have refined the system to the point that it is now possible to store the energy for an incredible 18 years
"Chip-scale solar thermal electrical power generation" (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2022.100789
What prevents this from being scaled up?
Previous submissions (2022): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Solar panels open crop lands to farming energy
This article promotes false assumptions.
Ordinary solar can work fine in fields, because most plants don't use light beyond a few hours' worth, and endure the heat, after.
A practical arrangement is bifacial panels in vertical fencerows running north-south, to pick up morning and afternoon sun, spaced widely enough for equipment to run between. Blocking morning sun preserves dew, and blocking afternoon cuts heat stress.
Certain cereal crops get slightly lower yield from reduced light, but reduced water loss can make up the difference.
FWIU, also sheep can graze under the shade of solar panels, thus eliminating the need to robo-mow beneath solar panels.
Livestock production improves from reduced weather stress. Lower evaporation loss cuts irrigation load.
California pulls the plug on rooftop solar
This was always a subsidy for rich people by poor people. The power generated by rooftop solar isn’t not worth 30 cents
Yep. I've always considered net metering immoral. Rich folks using poor folks for a free nighttime battery.
The fix is super simple. Just meter by the minute and pay out current wholesale electric rates as you send to the grid. When you buy, you pay retail for delivery depending on the instantaneous market.
Don't want to buy at potentially high rates during evening peak? Sounds like you need to invest in a battery system.
If you want to pretend you are a micro power plant, you should get paid as one.
With Buy-All Sell-All you buy all you use at retail rates and sell all you produce at wholesale rates. Buy-All Sell-All has a later breakeven point than Net Metering, where you buy what you can't produce at retail and sell back the rest at wholesale or better, which is an indirect subsidy for a resilient power grid with residential renewables with external benefits.
What you describe sounds like Buy-All Sell-All, except you're allowed to use and store what you produce before paying retail rates for electricity purchased from the service provider.
Is it anti-competitive to deny residential renewable energy producers the right to use the clean energy they invested in producing if they want to purchase electricity?
Another exclusive monopoly contract: if you buy water from me, you can't use the water you capture yourself.
Net metering in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering_in_the_United_Sta...
Net metering > "Post-net metering" successor tariffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#Post-net_metering...
We want there to be renewable residential energy. Subsidizing renewable energy will hasten adoption. We should subsidize residential renewable energy if we want there to be more renewable energy.
If we make the break-even point later in time, residential renewable energy will be less lucrative.
I’m so confused, is there something that prevents the “use what you produce and sell excess at wholesale?” That seems like it would be the sanest policy. If you can’t use your own power then I think getting paid retail rates is the only fair thing since that’s how much the power is worth to you.
FWIU, Buy-All Sell-All contracts have a "termination of agreement to provide service clause" if the residential renewables are not directly attached to the grid; it's against their TOS to use your own renewable energy and sell the rest, which is probably monopolistic and anti-competitive.
Is it legal to have a cutover so that it's possible to use one's own renewable energy when the power's out, given an exclusive Buy-All Sell-All agreement?
Perhaps there's an opportunity for a solution here: at the junction of batteries, renewables, and local [government-granted-monopoly with exclusive first-mover rights of way over and under other infrastructure] electrical-utility junction; there could be a controller that knows at least:
- 1a) when the grid is down
- 1b) when the grid wants the customer to slowly increase load e.g. after the power has been out
- 1c) when it's safe to send more electricity to the grid e.g. at retail or wholesale or intraday rates
- 2a) how full are the local batteries
- 2b) the current and projected local load && how much of that can be throttled down
- 2ba) how full and heated the hot water tank(s) are
- 2bb) the current and projected external and internal air temperature and humidity
- 2bba) the current and projected internal air temperature and humidity, per e.g. bath fans and attic fans with or without in-wall-controllers with humidistats
- 2bc) projected electrical needs for cooking, baking, microwaving (typically at 100W*15amps=1500W or more)
- 2c) how many volts at how many amps the local renewables are producing
But IIUC, Buy-All Sell-All service provision agreements threaten termination of service if the customer/competitor does anything but sell all locally produced electricity to the grid by direct connection, so an emergency cut-over that charges your batteries off your solar panels instead of the grid (e.g. when the grid is down) is forbidden.
New Docker Desktop: Run WASM Applications Alongside Linux Containers in Docker
This feels huge.
I haven't messed with WASM yet but I do love the idea of being able to build something that targets wasm/wasi with Docker like I'm already doing today and still package all of its dependencies into a single Docker image.
I also love the fact that code that targets wasm can run in a browser or on the machine in an isolate without hard forking.
It used to be called EAR file.
HTTP SXG and Web Bundles (and SRI) - components of W3C Web Packaging - may be useful for a signed WASM package format: https://github.com/WICG/webpackage#packaging-tools
How is WASM distinct from an unsigned binary blob?
Nothing other than trying to reboot the ecosystem for VCs.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/tools/window...
Sigstore is a CNCF project for centralized asset signatures for packages, containers, software artifacts; Cosign, Gitsign: https://docs.sigstore.dev/#how-to-use-sigstore
Re: TUF, Sigstore, W3C DIDs, CT Certificate Transparency logs, W3C Web Bundles; and reinventing the signed artifact wheel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30682329 ("Podman can transfer container images without a registry")
From "HTTP Messages Signatures" (~SXG) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29281449 :
> blockcerts/cert-verifier-js ?
blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js: https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js
When will emscripten output java byte code?
Just because something existed before something else doesn't mean a competitor can't spring up and have more momentum. It feels like the JVM is massively falling behind and it loses out massively on things like memory efficiency.
Even on that WASM is a follower,
"NestedVM provides binary translation for Java Bytecode. This is done by having GCC compile to a MIPS binary which is then translated to a Java class file. Hence any application written in C, C++, Fortran, or any other language supported by GCC can be run in 100% pure Java with no source changes."
With greetings from 2006, http://nestedvm.ibex.org/
How does the memory usage change? Does Java still require initial RAM reservation? /? Java specify how much RAM https://www.google.com/search?q=java+specify+how+much+ram
VOC transpiles Python to Java bytecode. Py2many transpiles Python to many languages but not yet Java.
Apache Arrow can do IPC to share memory references to structs with schema without modification between many languages now; including JS and WASM. https://arrow.apache.org/
FWIU Service Workers and Task Workers and Web Locks are the browser APIs available for concurrency in browsers and thus WASM. https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/1639#issueco...
"WebVM" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168491 :
> Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? [Or Git; though there's already isomorphic-git in JS]
"WebGPU" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30601415
Emscripten-compiled WASM can be packaged with ~conda packages and built and hosted by emscripten-forge ( which works like conda-forge, which has Python, R, Julia, Rust) to be imported from JS and WASM. Here's the picomamba recipe.yml on emscripten-forge: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/blob/main/recipe... and for CPython: https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/blob/main/recipe...
Browsers could run WASM containers, too. How does the browser sandbox+ WASM runtime sandbox (that lacks WASI) compare to the security features of Linux containers?
How do the docstrings look after transpilation?
Are there relative performance benchmarks that help estimate the overhead of the WASM-recompilation and runtime? How much slower is it to run the same operations with the same code in a runtime with WASI support?
Are there cgroups and other container features for WASM applications?
Is there any way to tell whether an unsigned WASM bundle is taking 110% of CPU in a browser tab process?
Do browser tabs yet use cgroups functionality to limit resource exhaustion risks?
Should we be as confident in unsigned WASM in a WASM runtime as with TUF-signed containers?
Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?
Your choices needn't be only math books. They can come from any discipline or genre.
When you mention any book please add a line or two as to why it made you a better thinker and problem solver.
This suggestion is humorous, but absolutely true: Potty Training In 3 Days.
Before having children, I thought I was fairly empathetic and introspective, but raising a child helped me realize how superficial those traits in myself were.
I'm being completely honest when I say this book made me a better leader and project manager - having a better understanding of the motivations of others, incentivizing those looking to you for guidance based on their own goals/desires, providing those with tools they need to succeed, and taking a macro view of a problem and allowing those under me to flourish and find creative ways to solve problems that take advantage of their strengths and idiosyncrasies.
I'm in no way suggesting that you infantilize those around you, just that teaching my toddler to shit opened my eyes to the way I approached problems, and Brandi Brucks' book helped me approach things differently with great success!
"The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child" https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/11h7dr5mm6&hl=en-US&q...
"Everyday Parenting: The ABCs of Child Rearing" (Kazdin, Yale,) https://www.coursera.org/learn/everyday-parenting :
> The course will also shed light on many parenting misconceptions and ineffective strategies that are routinely used.
Re: Effective praise and Validating parenting
https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/kids
I love Kazdin, great additional suggestion. I didn't know there was a course on Coursera though, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for these suggestions, bought the books & signed up for the course!
Building arbitrary Life patterns in 15 gliders
Interestingly enough, the concept of placing gliders at a distance away seems to touch on the relativity of space and time. Here, with space, we are also encoding the time at which a certain pattern (a glider) appears where it's needed. In a rigid system like the GoL, we can't trade space with time easily, since everything happens at a constant speed, but it makes one wonder...
...if there's a GoL version where time varies somehow¹ with something²
¹ directly?
² amount of activity? mass?
There have been a lot of GoL variants over the years, but I don't remember running into any attempts to vary the speed of evolution in different locations on the same grid.
The idea that all neighbors move to the next tick simultaneously is a fundamental assumption in cellular automata in general. If you try changing that, the optimizations that allow us to simulate CAs at any kind of reasonable speed ... all stop working, pretty much. It's kind of painful even to think about.
Which means there are probably very interesting rules out there somewhere, where CAs run faster/slower depending on pattern density -- it's just going to be very tricky to explore that particular search space.
The "superstep" that we practically impose upon simulations of entropy and emergence is out of accord with our modern understanding of non-regularly-quantizable spacetime. The debuggable Von Neumann instruction pipeline precludes "in-RAM computing" which conceivably does converge if consensus-level error correction is necessary.
The term 'superstep' reminds me of the HashLife algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife for computing the Game of Life. It computes multiple generations at the same time, and runs at different speeds in different parts of the universe, but only with the purpose of computing CGoL faster, not to introduce any relativity.
How does it "touch on relativity of space and time"?
I think that was just saying "more space between initial gliders implies a longer time needed to complete construction". There's no Einsteinian relativity to be found here.
(A Doppler effect does show up in Conway's Life sometimes, but that's about as far as we get with analogies to the physical universe...!)
How nonlocal are the entanglements in Conway's game of cellular automata, if they're entanglements with symmetry; conservation but emergence? TIL about the effect of two Hadamard gates upon a zero.
Quantum discord: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord :
> In quantum information theory, quantum discord is a measure of nonclassical correlations between two subsystems of a quantum system. It includes correlations that are due to quantum physical effects but do not necessarily involve quantum entanglement.
From "Convolution Is Fancy Multiplication" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25194658 :
> FWIW, (bounded) Conway's Game of Life can be efficiently implemented as a convolution of the board state: https://gist.github.com/mikelane/89c580b7764f04cf73b32bf4e94...
Conway's Game is a 2D convolution; without complex phase or constructive superposition.
Convolution theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_theorem :
> In mathematics, the convolution theorem states that under suitable conditions the Fourier transform of a convolution of two functions (or signals) is the pointwise product of their Fourier transforms. More generally, convolution in one domain (e.g., time domain) equals point-wise multiplication in the other domain (e.g., frequency domain). Other versions of the convolution theorem are applicable to various Fourier-related transforms.
From Quantum Fourier transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform :
> The quantum Fourier transform can be performed efficiently on a quantum computer with a decomposition into the product of simpler unitary matrices. The discrete Fourier transform on 2^{n} amplitudes can be implemented as a quantum circuit consisting of only O(n^2) Hadamard gates and controlled phase shift gates, where n is the number of qubits.[2] This can be compared with the classical discrete Fourier transform, which takes O(n*(2^n)) gates (where n is the number of bits), which is exponentially more than O(n^2).
MicroPython officially becomes part of the Arduino ecosystem
Thonny has MicroPython support.
"BLD: Install thonny with conda and/or mamba" https://github.com/thonny/thonny/issues/2181
Mu editor has MicroPython support: https://codewith.mu/
For VSCode, there are a number of extensions for CircuitPython and MicroPython:
joedevivo.vscode-circuitpython https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=joedeviv...
Pymakr https://github.com/pycom/pymakr-vsc/blob/next/GET_STARTED.md
Pico-Go: https://github.com/cpwood/Pico-Go
/? CircuitPython MicroPython: https://www.google.com/search?q=circuitpython+micropython
Aurdino IDE now has support for Raspberry Pi Pico.
arduino-pico: https://arduino-pico.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Rshell and ampy are CLI tools for MicroPython:
rshell: https://github.com/dhylands/rshell
ampy: https://github.com/scientifichackers/ampy
Fedora MicroPython docs: https://developer.fedoraproject.org/tech/languages/python/mi...
awesome-micropython: https://github.com/mcauser/awesome-micropython#ides
awesome-arduino: https://github.com/Lembed/Awesome-arduino
KiCad (ngspice) is an open source tool for circuit simulation. Tinkercad is another.
TIL about Mecanum wheels.
wokwi/rp2040js: https://github.com/wokwi/rp2040js:
> Raspberry Pi Pico Emulator for the Wokwi Simulation Platform. It blinks, runs Arduino code, and even the MicroPython REPL!
What are some advantages of Arduino IDE? (which is cross-platform and now supports MicroPython and Pi Pico W (a $6 IC with MicroUSB and a pinout spec))
ELIZA is Turing Complete
It's referring to the ELIZA scripting language, not the original "therapist" interface. A programming language being Turing-complete isn't really news, it's... the main point, unless you are intentionally trying to avoid being Turing-complete.
> A programming language being Turing-complete isn't really news, it's... the main point, unless you are intentionally trying to avoid being Turing-complete.
For example, Bitcoin "smart contracts" are intentionally not Turing-complete, and there are not per-opcode costs like there are for EVM and eWASM (which are embedded in other programs than Ethereum)
"The Cha Cha Slide Is Turing Complete" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32477593 :
> Turing completeness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
> Church-Turing thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
Halting problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem :
> A key part of the proof is a mathematical definition of a computer and program, which is known as a Turing machine; the halting problem is undecidable over Turing machines. It is one of the first cases of decision problems proven to be unsolvable. This proof is significant to practical computing efforts, defining a class of applications which no programming invention can possibly perform perfectly.
Quantum Turing machine > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine :
> [...] any quantum algorithm can be expressed formally as a particular quantum Turing machine. However, the computationally equivalent quantum circuit is a more common model.[1][2]
> History: [2005] A quantum Turing machine with postselection was defined by Scott Aaronson, who showed that the class of polynomial time on such a machine (PostBQP) is equal to the classical complexity class PP.
Complexity Zoo > Petting Zoo > {P, NP, PP,}, Modeling Computation > Deterministic Turing Machine https://complexityzoo.net/Petting_Zoo#Deterministic_Turing_M...
-
When I read the title, I too assumed it was about dialectical chatbots and - having just read turtledemo.chaos - wondered whether there's divergence and potentially infinite monkeys and then emergence of a reverse shell to another layer of indirection; turtles all the way down w/ emergence.
Draft RFC: Cryptographic Hyperlinks
This hashlink spec seems to duplicate the existing Named Information (ni:) URI scheme (RFC6920), as well as widely deployed non-standard solutions, namely magnet: URI's. These don't seem to currently support the Multihash format that's recommended here, but could easily be extended/amended to that effect. Not seeing the point of this.
Neither RFC6920 nor magnet: URIs appear to support the "just add a url parameter with the hash to the existing URL" use case, FWICS.
CAS Content-addressable storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage#Op... : IPFS <CID>/path
RFC6920: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6920.html
Magnet URI scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
draft-sporny-hashlink-07 2021: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sporny-hashlink-... :
<url>?hl=<resource-hash>The URL-parameter method is application-specific though, not sure it’s very useful to have a standard for that. Applications can just use whatever parameter name makes sense for them plus an existing hash/CAS encoding for the value.
How else can browsers check the hash of a file downloaded over HTTPS?
The main focus of the draft RFC is to define a new "hl" hashlink URL scheme. This doesn't necessariy target browsers, though they could certainly choose to support that scheme. The URL-parameter encoding, which is not the recommended encoding, is merely for "existing applications utilizing historical URL schemes", which may or may notinclude browsers. The draft explicitly states: "Implementers should take note that the URL parameter-based encoding mechanism is application specific and SHOULD NOT be used unless the URL resolver for the application cannot be upgraded to support the RECOMMENDED encoding."
HTTP SRI Subresource Integrity allows for specifying which cryptographic hash is presented, like ld-proofs has a "future-proof" signatureSuite attribute : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...
> Subresource Integrity with the <script> element
> You can use the following <script> element to tell a browser that before executing the https://example.com/example-framework.js script, the browser must first compare the script to the expected hash, and verify that there's a match.
<script
src="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://example.com/example-framework.js"
integrity="sha384-oqVuAfXRKap7fdgcCY5uykM6+R9GqQ8K/uxy9rx7HNQlGYl1kPzQho1wx4JwY8wC"
crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
[...]
Note: An integrity value may contain multiple hashes separated by whitespace. A resource will be loaded if it matches one of those hashes
cat FILENAME.js | openssl dgst -sha384 -binary | openssl base64 -A ### 1.1. Multiple Encodings
A hashlink can be encoded in two different ways, the RECOMMENDED way
to express a hashlink is:
hl:<resource-hash>:<optional-metadata>
To enable existing applications utilizing historical URL schemes to
provide content integrity protection, hashlinks may also be encoded
using URL parameters:
<url>?hl=<resource-hash>
Implementers should take note that the URL parameter-based encoding
mechanism is application specific and SHOULD NOT be used unless the
URL resolver for the application cannot be upgraded to support the
RECOMMENDED encoding.
[...]
#### 3.2.1. Hashlink as a Parameterized URL Example
The example below demonstrates a simple hashlink that provides
content integrity protection for the "http://example.org/hw.txt"
file, which has a content type of "text/plain":
http://example.org/hw.txt?hl=
zQmWvQxTqbG2Z9HPJgG57jjwR154cKhbtJenbyYTWkjgF3eHydrogen-producing rooftop solar panels nearing commercialization
Is this more or less flammable than rooftop solar?
Could adjacent H2O and CO2 capture and storage help mitigate hydrogen fire risk?
I really cringe at the thought of H2 at home for multiple reasons.
- a wide explosive concentration range (LEL to UEL). The wider the range, the more opportunity you have for encountering an explosive mix if there's a leak.
- a low ignition energy. A small static discharge has more than enough energy to ignite H2.
- It's a functionally difficult gas to work with. It's an escape artist. You have to use the right materials. You have issues like embrittlement, hydrogen stress cracking. It's not great from a volumetric energy density perspective - more watts are required for pumping X units of energy than a fuel with a higher energy density. To bump up the energy density, you compress it and or liquefy it.. which costs energy, you've got high working pressures, and are possibly dealing with cryogenics as well.
FWIU actually Green hydrogen is where they're actually considered the total "path to value".
Charge the grid with it; whatever it is, if it's "economical": charge the grid with it.
> [ Hydrogen Safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety ; videos: [ ]]
>> Contents: Prevention, Inerting and purging, Ignition source management (two rocks, HVAC, lighting, ), Mechanical integrity and reactive chemistry, Leaks and flame detection systems, Ventilation and flaring (all facilities that process Hydrogen must have anti-static ventilation systems), Inventory management and facility spacing, Cryogenics, Human factors, Incidents, *Hydrogen codes and standards*, Guidelines*
Would capturing CO2 and water with the same or adjacent PV/TPV+ panels help mitigate Hydrogen Hazard? FWIU, Aerogels and hydrogels can be made from CO2.
A possibility would be to put the H2 into a different storage medium like ammonia or methanol, rather than storing it as gaseous hydrogen.
"With a plan to decarbonize heating systems with hydrogen, Modern Electron raises $30M" (2022) https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/03/with-a-plan-to-decarbonize... :
> The second, which is still under development but about to make its debut, is what they’re calling the Modern Electron Reserve, which rather than burning natural gas — which is mostly CH4, or methane — reduces it to solid carbon (in the form of graphite) and hydrogen gas. The gas is passed on to the furnace to be burned, and converted to both heat and energy, while the graphite is collected for disposal or reuse.
And there's a picture of what's left after they extract just the Hydrogen from PNG/LNG for one day of home heat.
Letting the grass grow longer is one way to absorb carbon locally; longer grass is more efficient at absorbing carbon (e.g. carbon emitted by comparatively inefficiently burning natural gas for heat (an exothermic critical reaction))
Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
Hey HN,
Over the past two years, I've been building Upbase, an all-in-one PM tool.
I've tried so many project management tools over the years (Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Teamwork, Wrike, Monday, etc.) but they've all fallen short. Most of them are overly complicated and painful to use. Some others, like Trello, are too limited for my needs.
Most importantly, most of these tools tend to be focused on team collaboration and completely ignore personal productivity.
They are useful for organizing my work, but not great at helping me stay focused to get things done.
That's why I decided to build Upbase.
I try to make it clean and simple, without all the bells and whistles. Apart from team collaboration, I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc. so I don't need another to-do list app.
Now I can use Upbase to collaborate with my team AND manage your personal stuff at the same time, without all the bloat.
If these resonate with you, then give Upbase a try. It has a Free Forever plan though.
Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!
One thing I've always wanted in a tool like this is the ability to map out probabilities, i.e., we do A, then B but after that we do either C,D or E. Each one on these has an associated probability (C: 0.4, D: 0.5, E: 0.1) and an associated estimate (C: 10 +- 5 normal, D: 12 +- 3 uniform, E: 3 +-1 normal).
The UI would look like a graph and like ms project it could include resource levelling in order to show bottlenecks.
I know this probably sounds complicated but I think it maps to reality fairly well and thus actually simple (fighting reality is hard).
Gantt charts can be made in MS Project, Google Sheets,: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
Critical path method > Basic techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method#Basic_tec... :
> Components: The essential technique for using CPM [8][9] is to construct a model of the project that includes the following:
> (1) A list of all activities required to complete the project (typically categorized within a work breakdown structure), (2) The time (duration) that each activity will take to complete, (3) The dependencies between the activities and, (4) Logical end points such as milestones or deliverable items.
> Using these values, CPM calculates the *longest path* of planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the project, and *the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer.* This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add up to the longest overall duration, regardless if that longest duration has float or not. This determines the *shortest time possible to complete the project.\ "*
Re: [Hilbert curve, Pyschedule, CSP,] Scheduling of [OS, Conference Room,] and other Resources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777451 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31777451
Complexity and/or Time estimates can be stuffed into nonexclusive namespaced label names on GitHub/GitLab/Gitea:
#ComplexityEstimate:
C:1
C: Fibonacci[n]
C: (A), J, Q, K, (A)
#TimeEstimate:
T:2d
T:5m
#Good First Issue
Gitea has untyped Issue dependency edges, but there could probably easily be another column in the is-it-a through table for the many-to-many Issue edges table to support typed edges with URIs i.e. JSONLD RDF.
GitLab Free supports the "relates to" Linked Issue relation; EE also supports "blocks"/"is blocked by".
Planning poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker
Agile estimation: https://www.google.com/search?q=agile+estimation
"Agile Estimating and Planning" (2005) https://g.co/kgs/kDScM7
CPM sounds a lot like a PERT chart, which was invented in the 1950's to help design and build the Polaris nuclear submarines during the Cold War[0]. PERT has been part of Microsoft Project for decades, so it's readily available.
When you really need it (like in the case of tens of thousands of people trying to build and ship a single project at lighting speed) PERT is an extremely powerful and effective project management methodology. If, on the other hand, your "project management division" is you, it's a dangerously seductive time sink that will consume huge amounts of your time building and tuning and gathering and updating data and information, for arbitrarily close to zero direct real benefit and huge net negative benefit. The increase in effectiveness you gain from all that modeling is, in software development projects, negligible and the cost of doing all that modeling is much higher than you think it will be if you've never done it (that's why we don't do waterfall planning in software - it's not that no one's thought of it, it's that it's not effective on projects of any real complexity). As with any approach to planning, PERT works best at a particular scale and project type, and it's typically a quite large scale non-software project.
In my personal opinion, from a software development standpoint, the valuable part of building a PERT chart is doing the work and thinking required to draw a dependency map for your tasks. Drawing all those lines to show what has to be done before what is an incredibly effective tool for helping you flesh out and find dependencies (tasks) you hadn't realized needed to be on your list. Use something like MS Project to build that dependency diagram, then force yourself to stop using Project because it's too seductive at making you feel like the data is giving you power when it's really just consuming your brainpower ineffectively. Use dependency mapping to build a waterfall caliber understanding of what you need to build, then set it aside and use more appropriate agile style approaches to actually work through the project in an optimum manner (which often means not building it in exactly the way you mapped out originally).
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_revie...
WBS: Work Breakdown Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure
PERT -> see also ->
"Project network" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_network :
> Other techniques: The condition for a valid project network is that it doesn't contain any circular references.*
> Project dependencies can also be depicted by a predecessor table. Although such a form is very inconvenient for human analysis, project management software often offers such a view for data entry.
> An alternative way of showing and analyzing the sequence of project work is the design structure matrix or dependency structure matrix.
design structure matrix or dependency structure matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_structure_matrix
READMEs, Issues, Pull Requests, and Project Board Cards may contain Nested Markdown Task Lists with Issue (and actual Pull Request) # references:
- [ ] Objective
- [x] Task 1 +tag
- [ ] #237 (GitHub fills in the Title and Open/Closed/Merged state and adds a *hover card*)
- [x] Multiline Markdown list item indentation
<URL|text|>
- ID#:
- Title:
- Labels: [ ]
- Description: |
- htps://URL#yaml-yamlld
- [x] Multiline Markdown list item indentation w/ --- YAML front matter delimiters
---
- id:
- title:
- labels: [ ]
---
- htps://URL#yaml-yamlld
| | Important | Not important
| Urgent |
| Not Urgent |
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment ... "Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141
NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages
# Infosec Memory Safety
## Hardware
- Memory protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_protection
- NX Bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
- Can non-compiled languages (e.g. those with mutable code objects like Python) utilize the NX bit that the processor supports?
- Can TLA+ find side-channels (which bypass all software memory protection features other than encryption-in-RAM)?
- How do DMA and IOMMU hardware features impact software memory safety controls? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993763
- DMA: Direct Memory Access
- DMA attack > Mitigations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack
- IOMMU: I-O Memory Management Unit; GPUs, Virtualization, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_ma...
- Kernel IOMMU parameters: Ctrl-F "iommu": https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/kernel-pa...
- RDMA: Remote direct memory access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_direct_memory_access
## Software
- Type safety > Memory management and type safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_safety#Memory_management_...
- Memory safety > Types of memory errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_safety#Types_of_memory_...
- Template:Memory management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Memory_management
- Category:Memory_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Memory_management
- Reference (computerscience) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(computer_science)
- Pointer (computer programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_(computer_programming)
- Smart pointer (computer programming) in C++: unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr; Python: weakref, Arrow Plasma IPC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_pointer
- Manual Memory Management > Resource Acquisition Is Initialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_memory_management#Resou...
- Resource acquisition is initialization (C++ (1980s), D, Ada, Vala, Rust), #Reference_counting (Perl, Python (CPython,), PHP,) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initia...
- Ada > Language constructs > Concurrency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)#Con...
- C_dynamic_memory_allocation#Common_errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_dynamic_memory_allocation#Co...
- Python 3 > C-API > Memory Managment: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/memory.html
- The Rust Programming Language > 4. Understanding Ownership > 4.1. What is Ownership? https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-00-understanding-ownersh...
- The Rust Programming Language > 6. Fearless Concurrency > Using Message Passing to Transfer Data Between Threads https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-02-message-passing.html#...
> One increasingly popular approach to ensuring safe concurrency is message passing, where threads or actors communicate by sending each other messages containing data. Here’s the idea in a slogan from the Go language documentation: “Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating.”
> To accomplish message-sending concurrency, Rust's standard library provides an implementation of channels. A channel is a general programming concept by which data is sent from one thread to another.
> You can imagine a channel in programming as being like a directional channel of water, such as a stream or a river. If you put something like a rubber duck into a river, it will travel downstream to the end of the waterway.
- The Rust Programming Language > 15. Smart Pointers > Smart Pointers: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-00-smart-pointers.html
- The Rust Programming Language > 19. Advanced Features > Unsafe Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html
- Secure Rust Guidelines > Memory management, > Checklist > Memory management: https://anssi-fr.github.io/rust-guide/05_memory.html
- Go 101 > "Type-Unsafe Pointers" https://go101.org/article/unsafe.html https://pkg.go.dev/unsafe
- https://github.com/rust-secure-code/projects#side-channel-vu...
- Segmentation fault > Causes, Examples, : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmentation_fault
- "CWE CATEGORY: Pointer Issues" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/465.html
- "CWE CATEGORY: Memory Buffer Errors" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1218.html
- "CWE-119: Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/119.html
- "CWE CATEGORY: SEI CERT C Coding Standard - Guidelines 08. Memory Management (MEM)" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1162.html
- "CWE CATEGORY: CERT C++ Secure Coding Section 08 - Memory Management (MEM)" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/876.html
- SEI CERT C Coding Standard > "Rule 08. Memory Management (MEM)" https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pa...
- SEI CERT C Coding Standard > "Rec. 08. Memory Management (MEM)" https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pa...
- Invariance (computer science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_(mathematics)#Invari...
- TLA+ Model checker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA%2B#Model_checker > The TLC model checker builds a finite state model of TLA+ specifications for checking invariance properties.
- Data remnance; after the process fails or is ended, RAM is not zeroed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_remanence
- Memory debugger; valgrind, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_debugger
- awesome-safety-critical https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#so... ; Software Safety Standards, Handbooks; Formal Verification; backup/ https://github.com/stanislaw/awesome-safety-critical/tree/ma...
- > Additional lists of static analysis, dynamic analysis, SAST, DAST, and other source code analysis tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511280
TEE Trusted Execution Environment > Hardware support, TEE Operating Systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment#...
List of [SGX,] vulnerabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions#List...
Protection Ring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_ring ... Memory Segmentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_segmentation
.data segment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_segment
.code segment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_segment
NX bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-execute_bit
Arbitrary code execution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execution :
> This type of attack exploits the fact that most computers (which use a Von Neumann architecture) do not make a general distinction between code and data,[6][7] so that malicious code can be camouflaged as harmless input data. Many newer CPUs have mechanisms to make this harder, such as a no-execute bit. [8][9]
> - Memory debugger; valgrind, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_debugger
"The GDB developer's GNU Debugger tutorial, Part 1: Getting started with the debugger" (2021) https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/04/30/the-gdb-develo...
"Debugging Python C extensions with GDB" (2021) https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2021/09/08/debugging-... & "Python Devguide" > "GDB support" https://devguide.python.org/advanced-tools/gdb/ :
run, where, frame, p(rint),
py-list, py-up/py-down, py-bt, py-locals, py-print
/? vscode debugger: https://www.google.com/search?q=vscode+debugger
/? juyterlab debugger: https://www.google.com/search?q=jupyterlab+debugger
Ghidra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra
> Ghidra can be used as a debugger since Ghidra 10.0. Ghidra's debugger supports debugging user-mode Windows programs via WinDbg, and Linux programs via GDB. [11]
Ghidra 10.0 (2021) Release Notes: https://ghidra-sre.org/releaseNotes_10.0beta.html
"A first look at Ghidra's Debugger - Game Boy Advance Edition" (2022) https://wrongbaud.github.io/posts/ghidra-debugger/ :
> - Debugging a program with Ghidra using the GDB stub
> - Use the debugging capability to help us learn about how passwords are processed for a GBA game
/? site:github.com inurl:awesome ollydbg ghidra memory https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agithub.com+inurl%3Aaw...
Memory forensics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_forensics
awesome-malware-analysis > memory-forensics: https://github.com/rshipp/awesome-malware-analysis/blob/main...
github.com/topics/memory-forensics: https://github.com/topics/memory-forensics :
- microsoft/avml: https://github.com/microsoft/avml :
/dev/crash
/proc/kcore
/dev/mem
Aluminum formate Al(HCOO)3: Earth-abundant, scalable, & material for CO2 capture
"Aluminum formate, Al(HCOO)3: An earth-abundant, scalable, and highly selective material for CO2 capture" (2022) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade1473
> Abstract: A combination of gas adsorption and gas breakthrough measurements show that the metal-organic framework, Al(HCOO)3 (ALF), which can be made inexpensively from commodity chemicals, exhibits excellent CO2 adsorption capacities and outstanding CO2/N2 selectivity that enable it to remove CO2 from dried CO2-containing gas streams at elevated temperatures (323 kelvin). Notably, ALF is scalable, readily pelletized, stable to SO2 and NO, and simple to regenerate. Density functional theory calculations and in situ neutron diffraction studies reveal that the preferential adsorption of CO2 is a size-selective separation that depends on the subtle difference between the kinetic diameters of CO2 and N2. The findings are supported by additional measurements, including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, and variable temperature powder and single-crystal x-ray diffraction.
"NIST Breakthrough: Simple Material Could Scrub Carbon Dioxide From Power Plant Smokestacks" (2022) https://scitechdaily.com/nist-breakthrough-simple-material-c... :
> [What to do with all of the captured CO2?]
>> - Generate more formic acid to capture more CO2
- Make protein powder (#Solein,). And nutrients and flavors?
- Feed algae
- Feed plants, greenhouses
- CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage
- Firefighting: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572664456210948104
- Make aerogels. Aerogels are useful for firefighter protective clothing, extremely lightweight insulation, extremely lightweight packing materials, aerospace; and no longer require supercritical drying to produce: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572662622423584770?t=A...
- Make hydrogels. Hydrogels are useful for: firefighting: https://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogel+firefighting https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572664456210948104
- Make diamonds, buckyballs, fullerenes, graphene
- Water filtration: activated carbon, nanoporous graphene
Is there a similar process ("MOF,) for capturing Methane from flue gas? Is that before or after the CO2 capture?
- Methane is worse for Earth than CO2 FWIU. And there are many uncapped wells leaking methane, as now visible from space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33431427
- It's possible to make CBG Cleaner Burning Gasoline from methane (natural gas)
How does the #CophenHill recycling and flue capture facility currently handle CO2 and Methane capture?
- "Transforming carbon dioxide into jet fuel using an organic combustion-synthesized Fe-Mn-K catalyst." (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20214-z https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25559414
Electrons turn piece of wire into laser-like light source
Full paper is here https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr485152
"Coherent Surface Plasmon Polariton Amplification via Free Electron Pumping" (2022) Ye Tian, Dongdong Zhang, Yushan Zeng, Yafeng Bai, Zhongpeng Li, and 1 more https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1572967/v1
> Abstract: Surface plasmonic with its unique confinement of light is expected to be a cornerstone for future compact radiation sources and integrated photonics devices. The energy transfer between light and matter is a defining aspect that underlies recent studies on optical surface-wave-mediated spontaneous emissions. But coherent stimulated emission, being omnipresent in every laser system, remains to be realized and revealed in the optical near fields unambiguously and dynamically. Here, we present the coherent amplification of Terahertz surface plasmon polaritons via free electron stimulated emission. We demonstrate the evolutionary amplification process with a frequency redshift and lasts over 1-mm interaction length. The complementary theoretical analysis predicts a 100-order surface wave growth when a properly phase-matched electron bunch is used, which lays the ground for a stimulated surface wave light source and may facilitate capable means for matter manipulation, especially in the Terahertz band.
Polariton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polariton
Surface plasmon polaritons : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plasmon_polaritons :
> [...] Application of SPPs enables subwavelength optics in microscopy and photolithography beyond the diffraction limit. It also enables the first steady-state micro-mechanical measurement of a fundamental property of light itself: the momentum of a photon in a dielectric medium. Other applications are photonic data storage, light generation, and bio-photonics.[2][3][4][5]
Near-infrared window in biological tissue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_window_in_biolog...
NIRS Near-infrared spectroscopy > Applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy#App...
This looks ripe for some cutting edge table-top physics!
TabPFN: Transformer Solves Small Tabular Classification in a Second
From https://twitter.com/FrankRHutter/status/1583410845307977733 :
> This may revolutionize data science: we introduce TabPFN, a new tabular data classification method that takes 1 second & yields SOTA performance (better than hyperparameter-optimized gradient boosting in 1h). Current limits: up to 1k data points, 100 features, 10 classes. 1/6
[Faster and more accurate than gradient boosting for tabular data: Catboost, LightGBM, XGBoost]
Mathics: A free, open-source alternative to Mathematica
Is there a reasonably neutral comparison of Mathics vs Mathematica anywhere?
Based on an amazing showcase[1] Mathematica is right at the top of my list of languages to learn if it (and at least some of the surrounding tooling) ever becomes open source. I wonder how many of those examples would give useful results in Mathics, or what their equivalents would be.
The thing about Mathematica / the Wolfram language is that it's quite a bit harder to create an open source interpreter than it was for eg R (which is actually a FOSS interpteter for the commercial package S) or for Matlab (not sure what the status of Octave, the FOSS interpeter for Matlab code, is, I read an entry on a mailing list a long time ago that its sole dev was giving up). A lot of the symbolic solvers that are used under the hood are Wolfram's IP, and it would be a monumental effort to recreate something similarly powerful from scratch.
You've heard of SageMath right?
The biggest thing missing from SageMath is a step by step solver. (Edit to add a caveat, I'm sure many professionals depend on minutiae of one or the other)
Feature-wise I'd say Sage has more Mathematica functionality than Octave does for MATLAB. Sage is not trying to be compatible however presumably it wouldn't be that hard if the functionality is there?
Sage is a bit of a Frankenstein though
SageMath (and the cocalc-docker image, and JupyterLite, and mambaforge, ) include SymPy; which can be called with `evaluate=False`
Advanced Expression Manipulation > Prevent expression evaluation: https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorials/intro-tutorial/manip...
> There are generally two ways to prevent the evaluation, either pass an evaluate=False parameter while constructing the expression, or create an evaluation stopper by wrapping the expression with UnevaluatedExpr.
From "disabling automatic simplification in sympy" https://stackoverflow.com/a/48847102 :
> A simpler way to disable automatic evaluation is to use context manager evaluate. For example,
from sympy.core.evaluate import evaluate
from sympy.abc import x,y,z
with evaluate(False):
print(x/x)
IIRC there is a Wolfram Jupyter kernel?
WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter: https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter
mathics/IMathics is the Jupyter kernel for mathics: https://github.com/mathics/IMathics@main#egg=imathics
#pip install jupyter_console imathics
#conda install -c conda-forge -y jupyter_console jupyterlab
mamba install -y jupyter_console jupyterlab
jupyter console
jupyter kernelspec list
pip install -e git+https://github.com/mathics/imathics@main#egg=mathics
jupyter console --kernel=
%?
%logstart?
%logstart -o demo.log.py
The Python Jupyter kernel checks IPython.display.display()'d objects for methods in order to represent an object in a command line shell, graphical shell (qtconsole), notebook (.ipynb), or a latex document: _repr_mimebundle_(), _repr_html_(), _repr_json_(), _repr_latex_(), ..., __repr__(), __str__()
The last expression in an input cell of a notebook is implictly displayed:
from IPython.display import display
%display? # argspec, docstring
%display?? # ' & source code
display(last_expresssion)
Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth
Micro black hole > Black holes in quantum theories of gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole#Black_holes_i...
Virtual black hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_black_hole
Timeline of gravitational physics and relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_gravitational_phys...
- [ ] Superfluid Quantum Gravity
-- [ ] GR + Bernoulli's re: Dark Matter/Energy: Fedi (2017),
"What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere?" https://youtu.be/srVKjWn26AQ
> Just one Planck relic per 30km cube, and that’s enough to make up most of the mass in the universe
Quantum foam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
Sudo: Heap-based overflow with small passwords
Another day, another CVE in tool that we rely on everyday
The first question that we all want to ask
Could it be mitigated by safer, modern tech?
Yes.
One does not even need to reach for Rust. Literally any other language (in common use) other than very badly used C++ would not have had this problem.
C delenda est.
but if sudo was written in java we'd have other problems ;)
Do you know one of the reasons why Multics had a better security score than UNIX on DoD assement?
PL/I does bounds checking by default.
For reals. The fact that C toolchains have never even offered a bullet-proof bounds-checked (no UB) mode, no matter what the slowdown, boggles the mind. For something like sudo, literally running 100x slower would not be an issue. Its highest priority should be security.
100x slower would definitely be an issue. I am prompted for my sudo password probably 30x daily.
How long does sudo take to load on your system. Multiply that by 3000, is it really a noticeable number?
Seems to float around 0.005s (using "time sudo -k" to avoid timing user input), so yeah, x3000 = 15 seconds. Very noticeable.
Or even the x100 from (G)GP, that's a half second. Sometimes spiking to a full second.
I have once seen a proposal to make any sudo call wait for 10 seconds before doing anything so that the person running it has a moment to thing about what they just did do (and have ~10 seconds to ^C cancel it).
The person arguing also brought up that normally anything needing sudo should be automatized so that should be fine.
I'm not doing enough system administration to judge if that is a sane idea or not ;=)
That might be a reasonable idea but the time probably shouldn't be imposed by performance constraints.
Does it say somewhere that non-neteork-io PAM modules are supposed to be constant time?
def add_noise(t=10):
time.sleep(t-1)
time.sleep(
uniformrandom(min=0,max=1))
(Re: Short, DES passwords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES :
> A CVE released in 2016, CVE-2016-2183 disclosed a major security vulnerability in DES and 3DES encryption algorithms. This CVE, combined with the inadequate key size of DES and 3DES, NIST has deprecated DES and 3DES for new applications in 2017, and for all applications by the end of 2023.[1] It has been replaced with the more secure, more robust AES.
Except for PQ. For PQ in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32760170 :
> NIST PQ algos are only just now announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32281357 : Kyber, NTRU, {FIPS-140-3}? [TLS1.4/2.0?]
I'm not sure I follow this comment.
Adding a random amount of time seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Not sure what the links are all about, or the discussion of time complexity... I mean, there isn't an "input size" to talk about big-O scaling anyway, in the case of sudo.
Should the time to complete the (single-character) password-hashing/key-strengthening routine vary in relation to any aspect of the input ?
Timing attacks > Avoidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack
Cree releases LEDs designed for horticulture
Iirc chlorophyll has 2 very distinct absorption peaks [1] so it should be possible to design lights that target those frequencies. But knowing how LEDs work and the hacks with wavelength adjustment we use with phosphorus and others I’m sure it’s not easy.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Chloroph...
I mix 6000K/6500K (daylight) LED strips with 2700K (warm white) ones and plants seem very happy about it and it is OK for humans, too.
In fact I previously used only 6000K LED strips (in an insulated box so no other light at all) on cycad and other seeds and got very healthy plants.
I think the key for commercial applications like vertical farms is to optimise energy use by trying not to waste electricity on wavelengths that won't do much to boost production.
UV Ultraviolet light (UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C,) and near-UV "antimicrobial violet light" are sanitizing radiation.
Natural sunlight sanitizes because the radiation from the sun includes UV-* band radiation that is sufficient to radiate organic cells at this distance.
EM light/radiation intensity decreases as a function of the square of the distance from the light source (though what about superfluidic wave functions and accretion discs and microscopic black hole interiors (every 30km by one estimate) and Lagrangian points,).
"Inverse-square law" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
Ultraviolet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet
> Short-wave ultraviolet light damages DNA and sterilizes surfaces with which it comes into contact. For humans, suntan and sunburn are familiar effects of exposure of the skin to UV light, along with an increased risk of skin cancer. The amount of UV light produced by the Sun means that the Earth would not be able to sustain life on dry land if most of that light were not filtered out by the atmosphere. [2] More energetic, shorter-wavelength "extreme" UV below 121 nm ionizes air so strongly that it is absorbed before it reaches the ground. [3] However, ultraviolet light (specifically, UVB) is also responsible for the formation of vitamin D in most land vertebrates, including humans. [4] The UV spectrum, thus, has effects both beneficial and harmful to life.
Ultraviolet > Solar ultraviolet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet#Solar_ultraviolet
> The atmosphere blocks about 77% of the Sun's UV, when the Sun is highest in the sky (at zenith), with absorption increasing at shorter UV wavelengths. At ground level with the sun at zenith, sunlight is 44% visible light, 3% ultraviolet, and the remainder infrared. [23][24] Of the ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth's surface, more than 95% is the longer wavelengths of UVA, with the small remainder UVB. Almost no UVC reaches the Earth's surface. [25] The fraction of UVB which remains in UV radiation after passing through the atmosphere is heavily dependent on cloud cover and atmospheric conditions. On "partly cloudy" days, [...]
(Infrared light ~is heat.
There's usually plenty of waste heat from mechanical friction, exothermic chemical processes with gravity, lossy AC-DC conversion, and electronic components that waste energy/electron_field_disturbance//thermions/heat like steaming water towers sans superconducting channels wide enough for electrons to not start tunneling out without a ground or a negative)
Ultraviolet > Human health-related effects > harmful effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet#Harmful_effects
UV-A and UV-B protective eyewear (U6 polycarbonate) can be purchased in bulk. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=uvb+ansi+z87+glasses+20+pairs
Phlare: open-source database for continuous profiling at scale
What about maintenance on the existing projects? Open issues on Github:
Grafana: 2.6k issues, 275 PRs
Loki: 531 issues, 113 PRs
Mimir: 305 issues, 40 PRs
Tempo: 159 issues, 19 PRs
While they are open-source projects, I bet their software is still driven by customer feedback. I wouldn't put it past them to prioritize paying customer requests which takes time away from implementing features, doing bugfixes or code review.
I don't think it's fair to say that paying customer feedback is prioritised at the expense of the open-source community.
The thing with the core Grafana product being open source is that there's not that much dissimilarity between paying/enterprise Grafana users, and open-source users. Feedback from one set will almost always work in favor for the other.
NASA finds super-emitters of methane
How could a 2 mile long methane plume in New Mexico have been undetected for any significant amount of time?
From what I understand basic environmental monitoring is done in 2022 around all major industrial facilities in the U.S.
what interesting is there is nothing there. The only something are gas wells which the whole area is dotted with, so my only guess is leaky gas wells? https://www.google.com/maps/@32.3761968,-104.0819087,4787m/d...
Looks like Marathon Oil is the company
True story. I have worked oil and gas for a while and am familiar with this area. It can easily be a well not properly P&A'd (plugged and abandoned) - quite common down there. It is most likely a Marathon well (HARROUN COM #002), or it could be Eastland Oil (HARROUN A #007). If you want to get a better idea for yourself, you can check the EMNRD - https://ocd-hub-nm-emnrd.hub.arcgis.com/
Is there a way to IDK 3d earthen print a geodesic dome over the site and capture the waste methane (natural gas) into local tanks?
TIL about CBG: Cleaner Burning Gasoline
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1564443689623195650 :
> In September 2021 we covered a new "green gasoline" concept from @NaceroCo [in Penwell, TX] that involves constructing gasoline hydrocarbons by assembling smaller #methane molecules from natural gas
From https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opi... :
> The Inflation Reduction Act imposes a fee of [$900/ton] of methane starting in 2024 — this is roughly twice the current record-high price of natural gas and five times the average price of natural gas in 2020.
> These high fees present a strong incentive
... "Argonne invents reusable [polyurethane] sponge that soaks up oil, could revolutionize oil spill and diesel cleanup" (2017) https://www.anl.gov/article/argonne-invents-reusable-sponge-...
FWIU, heat engines are useful with all thermal gradients: pipes, engines, probably solar panels and attics; "MIT’s new heat engine beats a steam turbine in efficiency" (2022) https://www.freethink.com/environment/heat-engine
I hear what you are saying, and there is a ton of room in the E&P space for improvements of all kinds. You would be shocked at how incredibly we are behind technologically (I remember just last year over hearing someone say, "We just figured out our cloud strategy."). In terms of a dome over fields or units to collect stray methane, that may be an issue. We are loathe to construct "enclosed spaces" for gases as that can be a safety issue. It doesn't take much stray anything to kill you out there. We have all sorts of stories of people going into an enclosed space, passing out and dying, only to have more people die trying to get them out. Sounds bad, I know, but this is coming from someone who has come across a few dead bodies out in the field for various reasons - mostly just being stupid. Fees are funny in oil and gas - we complain about how much money we don't have and then spend it frivolously elsewhere. That inflation act, at the state level there are all sorts of those out there and some companies care and some don't. If you want to see something crazy, check out the NDIC (North Dakota Industrial Commission). In terms of oil and gas data, theirs is the most centralized, easily accessed, and complete in the country (NM isn't bad, CA used to be better, TX is garbage-which is odd, LA is god awful, and PA is meh). The NDIC keeps really good track of flaring, so to see how much natural gas is just burned up at the cost of getting the oil out (not such a great infrastructure for moving gas and historically the price hasn't been a good inducement to build any). To get the well level data, it is $150/year, but well worth it if you are working that basin and also in comparison to all of the data services out there. https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/statisticsvw.asp
So there only needs to be a bit of concrete in a smaller structure that exceeds bunker-busting bomb specs and 'funnels' (?) the natural gas to a tank or a bladder?
Are there existing methods for capturing methane from insufficiently-capped old wells?
Are the new incentives/fees/fines enough to motivate action thus far in this space?
OpenAPI is one way to specify integrable APIs. An RDFS vocabulary for this data is probably worthwhile; e.g. NASA Earth Science (?) may have a schema that all of the state APIs could voluntarily adopt?
Presumably the CophenHill facility handles waste methane? We should build waste-to-energy facilities in the US, too
FWIU Carbon Credits do not cover methane, which is worse than CO² for #ActOnClimate
Natural gas isn't stored on site, it needs to be piped to the nearest plant to be processed and put into a sales line. Capturing methane from insufficiently capped old wells would not be economic in most cases. If a company was called out on it, they would just go dump more cement in it to make sure the gas is contained. 90% of the time, wells that are plugged are plugged well, the ones that aren't and are just abandoned maybe leak only 1-5 thousand cubic feet per day - nothing worth doing anything about (to the company financially). Fines typically mean nothing to E&P with where they are now - though some have gotten clever about it - example being North Dakota keeps flaring down by whatever you are flaring you have to cut your oil production in some proportionate manner (oil is the more desired product) - though that was rescinded during the last big price down turn and am not sure if that is back in effect. To your statement about APIs - that is one thing the oil industry is terrrrrrible with. Our data collection and cleaning is abysmal. I agree with your statement, and I would be all for it, but E&P companies can't even get their own production numbers right - a good example is if you check out the fracfocus database where companies volunteer up their fracturing job compositions. Generally it is useful, but the people who input the data, similar to who would probably be handling this can barely spell and data cleaning would be a nightmare. waste to energy facilities are great, and there are some interesting things out in the oilfield but, like everything else, there needs to be more financial incentive for companies to build them/use them.
So, in 2022, it's cheaper to dump concrete than to capture it, but the new fines this year aren't enough incentive to solve for: capture to a tank and haul, build unprocessed natural gas pipelines, or process onsite and/or fill tankers onsite?
Data quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_quality
... Space -based imaging.
How long should they wait to up the methane fee if it's not enough to incentivize capping closed wells?
It is totally cheaper to dump some cement (it is mostly gel with a topping of cement). To P&A older wells maybe runs $12-25K (assuming, like, a 5-8k ft. depth conventional well)...and I may be running a little high on that number. That gets a small truck out there with a small crew to pull tubing and dump alternating layers of cement and gel (cement goes on the top and across formations that would be ground water bearing). Fun fact, if you have to go back into an abandoned well and you come across red cement at the top, that is indicative of someone losing a nuclear based well tool in there and to call someone before going further. A typical 7.5-10k foot lateral unconventional well (horizontal wells) down that way will run about $7-8 million depending (and 6 wells on average on a well pad), but aren't really the issue, but just giving you some numbers to sort of show that fining someone $100K for something serious isn't that big an expense and not really a deterrent. Natural gas lines are always a big deal to oil and gas companies - if you build it they will come. Most space in pipelines for operators is spoken for before they even dig the first trench.
Options:
A. Privately and/or Publicly grant to P&A wells
($25k+ * n_wells)
+ ($7-8m+ * m_wells)
C. increase the incentives/fines/fees
**
Shouldn't it be pretty easy to find such tools with IDK neutron detection and/or imaging at what distance?
Show HN: Linen – Open-source Slack for communities
Hi HN, My name is Kam. I'm the founder of Linen.dev. Linen communities is a Slack/Discord alternative that is Google-searchable and customer-support friendly. Today we are open-sourcing Linen and launching Linen communities. You can now create a community on Linen.dev without syncing it from Slack and Discord!
I initially launched Linen as a tool to sync Slack and Discord conversations to a search engine-friendly website. As I talked to more community managers, I quickly realized that Slack and Discord communities don't scale well and that there needs to be a better tool, especially for open-source knowledge-based communities. Traditionally these communities have lived on forums that solved many of these problems. However, from talking to communities, I found most of them preferred chat because it feels more friendly and modern. We want to bring back a bunch of the advantages of forums while maintaining the look and feel of a chat-based community.
Slack and Discord are closed apps that are not indexable by the internet, so a lot of content gets lost. Traditional chat apps are not search engine friendly because most search engines have difficulty crawling JS-heavy sites. We built Linen to be search engine friendly, and our communities have over 30,000 pages/threads indexed by google. Our communities that have synced their Slack and Discord conversations under their domain have additional 40,000 pages indexed. We accomplish this by conditionally server rendering pages based on whether or not the browser client is a crawler bot. This way, we can bring dynamic features and a real-time feel to Linen and support search engines.
Most communities become a support channel, and managing this many conversations is not what these tools are designed for. I've seen community admins hack together their own syncs and internal devices to work to stay on top of the conversations. This is why we created a feed view, a single view for all the threads in all the channels you care about. We added an open and closed state to every thread so you can track them similarly to GitHub issues or a ticketing system. This way, you and your team won't miss messages and let them drop. We also allow you to filter conversations you are @mentioned as a way of assigning tickets. I think this is a good starting point, but there is a lot more we can improve on.
How chat is designed today is inherently interrupt-driven and disrupts your team's flow state. Most of the time, when I am @mentioning a team member, I actually don't need them to respond immediately. But I do want to make sure that they do eventually see it. This is why we want to redesign how the notification system works. We are repurposing @mentions to show up in your feed and your conversation sections and adding a !mention. A @mention will appear in your feed but doesn't send any push notifications, whereas a !mention will send a notification for when things need a real-time synchronous conversation. This lets you separate casual conversations from urgent conversations. When everything is urgent, nothing is. (credit: Incredibles) This, along with the feed, you can get a very forum-like experience to browse the conversations.
Linen is free with unlimited history for public communities under https://linen.dev/community domain. We monetize by offering a paid version based on communities that want to host Linen under their subdomain and get the SEO benefits without managing their own self-hosted instance.
We are a small team of 3, and this is the first iteration, so we apologize for any missing features or bugs. There are many things we want to improve in terms of UX. In the near term, we want to improve search and add more deep integrations, DMs, and private channels. We would appreciate any feedback, and if you are curious about what the experience looks like, you can join us here at Linen.dev/s/linen
If I'm an organization choosing a chat platform, why would I want to use Linen versus Mattermost, which is also self-hostable and open-source, and much more mature? Or Matrix and Element (or any other Matrix client)?
This space is getting pretty crowded, and I'm not sure why I'd want to use Linen rather than one of the many alternatives.
I think it's misleading to call Mattermost "open source". Mattermost the for-profit company makes two products, one of which is open source, and a much larger one (which is approximately feature complete wrt modern Slack-likes) which is absolutely not.
The open source product they make does not work like a normal open source project: submitted improvements to it will presumably be denied if they add functionality that exists in the proprietary and closed source second product, also called Mattermost, or if they serve users (like removing the silent and nonconsensual phone-home spyware from segment.io that they embed in the released binaries). It's a normal and expected thing in the open source world for user communities to be able to participate in the software project. That's one of the defined goals of the idea of open source: you can fix and improve it, and share your fixes and improvements.
Mattermost the company is not really an "open source company", as they build and sell proprietary software as their main source of revenue. Their goal is increasing the use of proprietary software, and every user of the open source Mattermost is a target for them to convince to stop using open source and start using proprietary software. This is presumably why they make their open source version phone home to tell them about your usage of it, so that they can try to get you to pay them to start using the proprietary one if you get big/rich enough.
Furthermore, to even contribute to the "open source" project of Mattermost, you are required to sign a CLA, because they want to be able to resell your work commercially under nonfree licenses. You'll note there is no CLA required for most real open source work, because they don't care if you retain copyright - the open source license is all they need. There is no CLA required to contribute to Linux or gcc.
Mattermost the software is not really an "open source project" because you can't meaningfully improve the software as the maintainer has a vested financial interest in keeping basic features (like message expiry/retention periods/SSO) out of it to direct the community to become paid customers of their proprietary software.
Mattermost wants to use the work of contributors to an open source project to further their proprietary software goals, while maintaining their open source bait as a neutered stub.
It's open source in name only. The real Mattermost product is proprietary and the open source version only exists as a fake open source project to serve as an onramp for selling their closed source proprietary one.
> [Open-core Software Firm X] wants to use the work of contributors to an open source project to further their proprietary software goals, while maintaining their open source bait as a neutered stub.
Source-available software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
Open-core model > Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model#Examples
Who can merge which pull requests to the most-tested and most-maintained branch of a fork?
CLAs are advisable regardless of software license.
Re: Free and Open Source governance models: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1308465144863903744
Protobuf-ES: Protocol Buffers TypeScript/JavaScript runtime
Arrow Flight RPC (and Arrow Flight SQL, a faster alternative to ODBC/JDBC) are based on gRPC and protobufs: https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Flight.html:
> Arrow Flight is an RPC framework for high-performance data services based on Arrow data, and is built on top of gRPC and the IPC format.
> Flight is organized around streams of Arrow record batches, being either downloaded from or uploaded to another service. A set of metadata methods offers discovery and introspection of streams, as well as the ability to implement application-specific methods.
> Methods and message wire formats are defined by Protobuf, enabling interoperability with clients that may support gRPC and Arrow separately, but not Flight. However, Flight implementations include further optimizations to avoid overhead in usage of Protobuf (mostly around avoiding excessive memory copies
"Powered By Apache Arrow in JS" https://arrow.apache.org/docs/js/index.html#powered-by-apach...
What's with your slightly on-topic but mostly off-topic comments? Your post history almost looks like something written by GPT-3, following the same format and always linking to a lot of external resources that only briefly touch the subject.
It looks like a bot which scans a comment, identifies some buzz phrases, and quotes those lines, replying with generic linked information (e.g. wikipedia) about those phrases.
No.
Read: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/
If you have a question about what I just took the time to share with you here, that would be great. Otherwise, I'm going to need you on Saturday.
[deleted]
We need a replacement for TCP in the datacenter [pdf]
FWIU, barring FTL; superluminal communication breakthroughs and controls, Deep Space Networking needs a new TCP, as well:
From https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/net/ipv4/tcp_t... :
void tcp_retransmit_timer(struct sock *sk) {
/* Increase the timeout each time we retransmit. Note that
* we do not increase the rtt estimate. rto is initialized
* from rtt, but increases here. Jacobson (SIGCOMM 88) suggests
* that doubling rto each time is the least we can get away with.
* In KA9Q, Karn uses this for the first few times, and then
* goes to quadratic. netBSD doubles, but only goes up to *64,
* and clamps at 1 to 64 sec afterwards. Note that 120 sec is
* defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT. I guess
* we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the
* University of Mars.
*
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once
* implemented ftp to mars will work nicely. We will have to fix
* the 120 second clamps though!
*/
A Message from Lunny on Gitea Ltd. and the Gitea Project
> I created Gitea
No mention of Gogs anywhere, really classy.
(Gitea is a fork of Gogs)
> Gitea was created by Lunny Xiao, who was also a founder of the self-hosted Git service Gogs.
Gogs is a clone of GitHub and GitLab (which were both originally written in Ruby with the Ruby on Rails CoC Convention-over-Configuration Web Framework), which were built because Trac didn't support Git or multiple projects, Sourceforge didn't support Git or on-prem, and git patchbombs as attachments over emailing lists needed Pull Requests, and Issues and PRs should pull from the same sequence of autoincrement (*) integer keys.
- You can do ~GitHub Pages with Gitea and an idempotent git post-receive-hook that builds static HTML from a repo revision, tests, deploys to revid/ and updates a latest/ symlimk, and logs; or with HTTP webhooks.
- "Feature: Allow interacting with tickets via email" https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/2386#issuecomment-6...
- It's not safe to host Gitea on the same server as the CI (e.g. DroneCI) host if you grant permissions to the docker socket to the CI container: you need another VM at least to run the CI controller and workers on_push() with Gitea. https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/gitea/ :
> Please note we strongly recommend installing Drone on a dedicated instance. We do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine due to network complications, and we definitely do not recommend installing Drone and Gitea on the same machine using docker-compose.
GitHub and GitLab centralize git for project-based collaboration, which is itself a distributed system.
Linux System Call Table – Chromiumos
System call: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_call
Strace and similar tools can trace syscalls to see what kernel system calls are made by a process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strace#Similar_tools
Google/syzkaller https://github.com/google/syzkaller :
> syzkaller ([siːzˈkɔːlə]) is an unsupervised coverage-guided kernel fuzzer. Supported OSes: Akaros, FreeBSD, Fuchsia, gVisor, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows
Fuschia / Zircon syscalls: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/reference/syscalls
"How does Go make system calls?" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55735864/how-does-go-mak...
Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery
Over how many generations?
Genetic algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm
Mutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_(genetic_algorithm)
Crossover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_(genetic_algorithm)
Selection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_(genetic_algorithm)
...
AlphaZero / MuZero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero :
> MuZero was trained via self-play, with no access to rules, opening books, or endgame tablebases.
Self-play algorithms essentially mutate and select according to the game rules. For a generally-defined mastery objective, are there subjective and/or objective game rules, and is there a distance metric for ranking candidate solutions?
The Docker+WASM Technical Preview
Michael Irwin from Docker here (and author of the blog post too). Happy to answer your questions, hear feedback, and more!
maybe a naive question: is there a way to run some form of docker in the browser? It could be a great education / demo tool
Great question! There isn't a way to run Docker directly in the browser. But, there are tools (like Play with Docker at play-with-docker.com) that lets you interact with a CLI in the browser to run commands against a remote cloud instance. I personally use this a lot for demos and workshops!
But... certainly a neat idea to think about what Wasm-based applications could possibly look like/run in the browser!
Is it possible to sandbox the host system from the guests in WASM?
Are there namespaces and cgroups and SECCOMP and blocking for concurrent hardware access in WASM, or would those kernel protections be effective within a WASM runtime? Do WASM runtimes have subprocess isolation?
/? subprocess isolation https://www.google.com/search?q=subprocess+isolation on a PC:
- TIL about teh Endokernel: "The Endokernel: Fast, Secure, and Programmable Subprocess Virtualization" (2021) https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03705#
> The Endokernel introduces a new virtual machine abstraction for representing subprocess authority, which is enforced by an efficient self-isolating monitor that maps the abstraction to system level objects (processes, threads, files, and signals). We show how the Endokernel can be used to develop specialized separation abstractions using an exokernel-like organization to provide virtual privilege rings, which we use to reorganize and secure NGINX. Our prototype, includes a new syscall monitor, the nexpoline, and explores the tradeoffs of implementing it with diverse mechanisms, including Intel Control Enhancement Technology. Overall, we believe sub-process isolation is a must and that the Endokernel exposes an essential set of abstractions for realizing this in a simple and feasible way.
Sandbox (computer security) > Implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_(computer_security)
- [x] Linux containers
- [ ] WASM with or without WASI
eWASM has costed opcodes; basically like dynamic tracing in CPython.
Are there side channels for many or most of these sandboxing methods; even at the CPU level?
google/gvisor could be useful for this? https://github.com/google/gvisor :
> gVisor is an application kernel, written in Go, that implements a substantial portion of the Linux system surface. It includes an Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime called runsc that provides an isolation boundary between the application and the host kernel.
Python 3.11.0 Released
"What’s New In Python 3.11" https://docs.python.org/3.11/whatsnew/3.11.html
Tomorrow the Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,666
Approximations of Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_π
> In the 3rd century BCE, Archimedes proved the sharp inequalities 223⁄71 < π < 22⁄7, by means of regular 96-gons (accuracies of 2·10−4 and 4·10−4, respectively).
223/71 = 3.1408450704225
666/212 = 3.1415094339622
π = 3.14159265359
22/7 = 3.1428571428571
"Why do colliding blocks compute pi?" https://youtu.be/jsYwFizhncE https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/clacks-solution https://www.reddit.com/r/3Blue1Brown/comments/r29vm5/rationa... ... Geogebra: https://www.geogebra.org/m/BhxyBJUZ :
> The applet shows the old method used to approximate the value of π. Archimedes used a 96-sided polygons to find that the value of π is 223/71 < π < 22/7 (3.1408 < π < 3.1429). In 1630, an Austrian astronomer Christoph Grienberger found a 38-digit approximation by using 10^40-sided polygons. This is the most accurate approximation achieved by this method.
Bringing Modern Authentication APIs (FIDO2 WebAuthn, Passkeys) to Linux Desktop
WebAuthN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn
FIDO2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDO2_Project
Arch/WebAuthN: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/WebAuthn
U2F/FIDO2: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Universal_2nd_Factor
TPM: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trusted_Platform_Module#Oth...
Seahorse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seahorse_(software)
GNOME Keyring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Keyring
tpmfido: https://github.com/psanford/tpm-fido
"PEP 543 – A Unified TLS API for Python" (withdrawn*) https://peps.python.org/pep-0543/#interfaces
> Specifying which trust database should be used to validate certificates presented by a remote peer.
certifi-system-store https://github.com/tiran/certifi-system-store/blob/main/src/...
truststore/_openssl.py: https://github.com/sethmlarson/truststore/blob/main/src/trus...
"Help us test system trust stores in Python" (2022) https://sethmlarson.dev/blog/help-test-system-trust-stores-i... :
python -m pip install \
--use-feature=truststore FlaskScience, technology and innovation isn’t addressing world’s most urgent problems
> Changing directions: Steering science, technology and innovation for the Sustainable Development found that research and innovation around the world is not focused on meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which are a framework set up to address and drive change across all areas of social justice and environmental issues.
https://globalgoals.org/ #GlobalGoals #SDGs #Goal17
Each country (UN Member State) prepares an annual country-level report - an annual SDG report - on their voluntary progress toward their self-defined Targets (which are based upon Indicators; stats).
Businesses that voluntarily prepare a sustainability report necessarily review their SDG-aligned operations' successes and failures. The GRI Corporate Sustainability report is SDG aligned; so if you prepare an annual Sustainability report, it should be easy to review aligned and essential operations.
GRI Global Reporting Initiative is also in NL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Reporting_Initiative
> Critically, the report finds that research in high-income and middle-income countries contributes disproportionally to a disconnect with the SDGs. Most published research (60%-80%) and innovation activity (95%-98%) is not related to the SDGs.
Strategic alignment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment
https://USAspending.gov resulted from tracking State-level grants in IL: the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Funding_Accountability...
Unfortunately, https://performance.gov/ and https://USAspending.gov/ do not have any way to - before or after funding decisions - specify that a funded thing is SDG-aligned.
IMHO, we can easily focus on domestic priorities and also determine where our spending is impactful in regards to the SDGs.
> Illustrating the imbalance, the report found that 80 percent of SDG-related inventions in high-income countries were concentrated in just six of the 73 countries
Lots of important problems worth money to folks:
#Goal1 #NoPoverty
#Goal2 #ZeroHunger
#Goal3 #GoodHealth
#Goal4 #QualityEducation
#Goal5 #GenderEquality
#Goal6 #CleanWater
#Goal7 #CleanEnergy
#Goal8 #DecentJobs
#Goal9 #Infrastructure
#Goal10 #ReduceInequality
#Goal11 #Sustainable
#Goal12 #ResponsibleConsumption
#Goal13 #ClimateAction
#Goal14 #LifeBelowWater
#Goal15 #LifeOnLand
#Goal16 #PEACE #Justice
#Goal17 #Partnership #Teamwork
If you label things with #GlobalGoal hashtags, others can find solutions to the very same problems.
Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics
It reminds me of Sean Carrols Hilbert Space Fundamentalism.
Sean M. Carroll: Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space
Hilbert space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space :
From sympy.physics.quantum.hilbert https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/sympy/physics/qua... :
__all__ = [
'HilbertSpaceError',
'HilbertSpace',
'TensorProductHilbertSpace',
'TensorPowerHilbertSpace',
'DirectSumHilbertSpace',
'ComplexSpace',
'L2',
'FockSpace'
]
__all__ = [
'Operator',
'HermitianOperator',
'UnitaryOperator',
'IdentityOperator',
'OuterProduct',
'DifferentialOperator'
]
""" A module for mapping operators to their corresponding eigenstates and vice versa
It contains a global dictionary with eigenstate-operator pairings.
If a new state-operator pair is created,
this dictionary should be updated as well.
It also contains functions operators_to_state and state_to_operators for mapping between the two. These can handle both classes and instances of operators and states.
See the individual function descriptions for details.
TODO List:
- Update the dictionary with a complete list of state-operator pairs
"""
"""Logic for representing operators in state in various bases.
TODO:
* Get represent working with continuous hilbert spaces.
* Document default basis functionality.
"""
# ...
__all__ = [
'represent',
'rep_innerproduct',
'rep_expectation',
'integrate_result',
'get_basis',
'enumerate_states'
]
# ...
def represent(expr, **options):
"""Represent the quantum expression in the given basis.
From tequila/simulators/simulator_cirq https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila/blob/master/src/tequil... :
from tequila.wavefunction.qubit_wavefunction import QubitWaveFunction
> """ Export QCircuits as qasm code OPENQASM version 2.0 specification from:
> A. W. Cross, L. S. Bishop, J. A. Smolin, and J. M. Gambetta, e-print arXiv:1707.03429v2 [quant-ph] (2017). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.03429v2.pdf
Why are you posting this?
Because there is a functional executable symbolic algebra implementation of such Hilbert spaces and their practical representations (and qubit applications) that's approachable because it's not ambiguous MathTeX without automated tests and test assertions.
Because it's easier to learn math things by preparing a notebook with MathTex and/or SymPy expressions with a MathTeX representation and then make test assertions about the symbolic expression and/or `assert np.allclose()` with real valued parameters after symbolic construction and derivation
Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage
Many of the greenhouse Youtube channels I watch do a smaller DIY version of this. They have either dark barrels of water in the greenhouse with the windows facing south to the sun, or a thin metal wall filled with clay and pipes acting as a sun-heat-battery. They pump the water through the barrels or clay battery into pipes that are under ground to store the heat. In winter time they extract the heat from the ground keeping the greenhouse warm using a combination of solar and commercial power for the pumps. Heat is also extracted from compost bins at each end of the greenhouse. This works well in extremely cold climates in Canada and Alaska. A few of these folks do all of this without using any electricity at all and somehow manage to get water moving through the pipes using heat convection alone.
I've been thinking about doing something like this but connecting it to pipes under the foundation of my home so I can get rid of the wallboard heaters or just leave them off. Electricity is the only commercial utility near me.
This reminds me a lot of the Earthship community in the middle of the desert, which always focusses on smart ways of reusing water for different purposes, and by not wasting water as much as possible. The houses usually have a clean/grey/blackwater + a rainwormbox system to process fecals and reuse it for growing plants. Their air conditioning system is basically just a pipe in the ground where the hot air flows through, cools down, and automatically gets pushed through the house when they open the windows on the roof.
I was always wondering why there are no systems converting the unused electricity in potential energy by moving water to a higher ground. And more importantly: Why there are no water storages on the roof.
> I was always wondering why there are no systems converting the unused electricity in potential energy by moving water to a higher ground
There are a bunch of pumped storage facilities around [1]. But they work best at massive scale, so suitable locations are somewhat limited. Plus they are expensive to build and often face environmental protests (similar to building dams). Still, it's a solution I'm a fan of.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
emphasis on massive scale.
Moving 500,000 kg (over 1 million pounds) 7.5 meters (~25 feet aka the height of a house) will give you about 10 kWh of energy. This is equivalent to running a 425W device all day, like a small air conditioner. The relationship is linear. Double the weight or the distance to double the energy. All of the metal at a scrap yard I know of amounts to less than half that weight, for reference.
I'm also a fan because pumped storage is a really interesting storage method, but it is beyond niche. It is very tough to move that kind of weight around efficiently for what you get back. Pumping water to great heights is not easy either. (see also: moving rail-carts up a mountain)
They are building a lot of them in China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...
Makes sense, it is definitely a useful tool. I just think it is insufficient to act as storage. It can be good at producing variable amounts of Watts on demand but not so good at storing enough Watt-hours to keep things running for very long. I can see a great appeal for it to help with load-balancing for a significant amount of choppiness between supply and demand on the hour timescale.
For something like solar, where we will want to store over half our daily energy production at peak storage (ideally 2-3 days worth I think) - I don't think it holds up. Additionally, it doesnt seem like a good bet as a primary mechanism for either storage or on-demand generation if energy consumption continues to increase due to the rather large coefficients involved for scaling it up.
"The United States generated 4,116 terawatt hours of electricity in 2021"[1]
4,116 TWh/year = 11.2 TWh/day
The storage capacities for the largest items listed on the wiki is on the magnitude of GWh. The scale goes kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, then Terra. So we are talking about a need on the order of a thousand pumped storage facilities per country. The US would need over 50 of them per state (on average) in order to keep everything running without production for 24 hours. Doesnt matter how many solar panels we have, if we get 1 dark day then we would run out of power. If we tried to rely on solar entirely, we'd also still need very roughly half that amount of storage just to get through the night.
lithium batteries are obviously much better suited for overnight storage, but I have no idea what the numbers are on how much lithium is physically available to use as such storage.
If we want to get on the order of monthly to yearly storage to allow, for example, solar panels in alaska to provide enough energy for a resident to get through months of darkness - I have no idea what the leading storage options are, probably lithium still
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/188521/total-us-electric...
Sodium ion is expected to sharply take over cost limited applications some time in the next couple of years. There are pilot mass production programs designed to avoid scarce materials that drop into existing processes. Natron have products on the market (at presumably high cost) targetting datacenters for high safety applications.
For longer scale storage it's a tossup between opportunistic pumped hydro, CAES where geology makes it easy, hydrogen in similar areaswith caverns, ammonia, synthetic hydrocarbons, sodium ion, and one of the emerging molten salt or redox flow battery technogies. Lithium isn't really in the running due to resource limits.
Wires also have a lot of value for decreasing the need for storage. Joining wind and solar 1000s of km apart can greatly reduce downtime. Replacing as much coal and oil with those, and maintaining the OCGT and CCGT fleet is the fastest and most economic way to target x grams of CO2e per kWh where x is some number much smaller than the 400 of pure fossil fuels but bigger than around 50. Surplus renewable power (as adding 3 net watts of solar is presently cheaper than the week of storage to get an isolated area through that one week where capacity is 1/3rd the average) will subsidize initial investments into better storage and electrolysis with no further interventions needed.
Awesome response. I've come across the molten salt option but havent researched in depth. I saw it referenced as something a lot of scientists are hyping up, but I am not sure what kind of engineering challenges exist for implementation and maintenance.
Second paragraph is a bit too information dense, I had trouble following some of it. Renewable energy deficiencies will be localized, so i understand how wires help here. A larger connected area produces more stability, makes sense. Agreed with the carbon reduction priority to tackle coal and oil first. Surplus renewable power acting as a subsidy checks out, but that is skirting around the energy storage problem imo. Sounds like you are saying "instead of storing renewable energy, get more than you need and sell it back to the grid and then use those funds to buy the energy back later". This would certainly work for local consumers, but doesnt do too much to help the power grid itself manage what to do with the surplus energy. Sell it to neighboring power grids? Ties in to the first point about connecting a larger area - but what are the limits here? Can we physically connect the sunny side of earth to the dark side? (ignoring that it seems logistically/legally prohibitive)
the question really comes down to what should we be spending money on to get "better storage"? What are the best solutions for long-term local storage?
> the question really comes down to what should we be spending money on to get "better storage"? What are the best solutions for long-term local storage?
The solution I'm proposing is basically 'the best place to spend your money on storage is to not spend it on storage yet'
If the goal is to reduce emissions asap, then focusing on the strategy that removes x% of 100% of the emissions rather than 100% of y% of the emissions makes sense unless there are enough resources/money that y% is more than x%. And storage is currently expensive enough that you need many times as much money for this to be true to 99.9% confidence.
Getting a wind + solar system that has at least y watts at least eg. 90% of the time is remarkably affordable already and still going down.
In excellent climates new solar costs less per MWh than fuel for a gas turbine (and is not far off fuel for a nuclear reactor). Wind is not much more. Distribution, dealing with less than ideal sites and oversupply increase the cost, but an ideal mix has very little storage (4-12 hours) which can be delivered by lithium batteries.
By relying on the existing fossil fuel/hydro/nuclear/whatever to pick up the last 10% for now, you can replace more coal/oil more quickly than other strategies. During this build all storage technologies where they make the most sense so that when that last 10% is needed, prices will have dropped. I'm fairly sure some mix of green hydrogen and green ammonia burning in those same turbines will be one of the winners (ammonia in particular has negligible marginal cost of capacity allowing for a strategic reserve, and will be needed to replace fossil fuel derived fertilizer anyway).
In the unlikely case that there's an overnight $2 trillion investment in new wind/solar/powerlines and production capacity to match in the US then choosing a dispatchable power source from some or all of: expensive green hydrogen, expensive abundant existing batteries, expensive pumped hydro, and expensive nuclear or immediately going all in on commercialising every vaguely promising electrolyser tech becomes the priority.
Completely agree with the hybrid approach wrt reducing emissions. I am talking more towards work that would be done concurrently with that.
> During this build all storage technologies where they make the most sense so that when that last 10% is needed, prices will have dropped
this is kind of the point of what I'm getting at. Without any investment, none of the storage technologies are going to make much progress. If not financial investment, then at least a time investment from research/science teams. then again, maybe opportunism/free market will take care of this and we can assume any progress that can be made will be made by people trying to make a name for themselves or be first to market. I'm still curious to size up what that progress might look like for discussion/entertainment purposes in any case
Good storage solutions would immediately pay dividends through arbitrage, which would keep electric prices stable, and then anywhere renewable energy generation is more than demand and storage is sufficient, that stable price point could come down below the cost of using coal/oil as well as any other continuous production method. We would be able to consolidate power generation over time, not just space, and realize gains from that. As in, use massive bursts of energy production to top off storage and use them to exactly meet demand. Maybe this opens the door for more alternative energy production methods as well (that are better suited for burst than steady)
In terms of promising technologies, they're broadly categorisable as thermal, kinetic, battery/fuel cell, and thermochemical. Most of the promising ones are far enough along the learning curve that other markets (such as green hydrogen/ammonia for fertiliser driving electrolysers and small scale/more efficient chemical reactors) will drive the learning curve.
Thermal storage concepts include:
Molten salt thermal. short/medium for high grade heat. Most high grade heat is dispatchable (fire) and so doesn't make sense to store, or expensive (solar thermal, nuclear) and so isn't worth pursuing.
Sand thermal batteries. Low grade heat for medium/long term. Only useful for heating and some industrial purposes. Has a minimum size (neighborhood). Literally dirt cheap.
Thermochemical. I guess this is kind of a fuel? Use case is for low grade heat so it can go here. Phase change materials like sodium acetate or reversible solution like NaOH seem really appealing for heating. Back of envelope says it's close to competitive with electric heating, so I'd expect more attention as it's cheaper than any technology that stores work. No idea why it isn't being rolled out. You could even charge it with heat pumps for extremely high efficiency if needed.
Kinetic:
Lifting stuff. Only really works for water without large subsidies and only if you already have at least one handy reservoir like a watershed or cavern. No reason to expect it would suddenly get cheaper as digging holes and moving big things is already something lots of industries try to do cheaply. Great addition to existing hydro.
Sinking stuff (using buoys to store energy). I can't comprehend how this can be viable. I have seen it espoused, but it doesn't pass back of the envelope test unless I did a dumb.
Squashing stuff. Compressed air energy storage. Tanks are just barely competitive with last gen batteries capacity-wise, efficiency isn't great. There are concepts for underwater bladders (let the watter do the holding) or cavern based storage that seem viable at current rates. Achievable with abundant materials so worst case scenario we nut up and spend$500/kWh. Key word CAES, cavern or underwater energy storage
Battery/fuel cell:
Lithium ion: One of the best options currently. Will be heavily subsidised by car buyers. Has hit limits of current mining production which puts a floor on price and is ecologically devistating.
X ion where x is probably sodium: Great slot in replacement. Barring large surprises will expect it to replace LiFePO4 very soon for most uses. Expect the learning rate of lithium ion manufacturing to continue resulting in a sharp jump to $60/kWh in 2021 dollars and eventual batteries around $30/kWh. Key word natron (have just brought their first product to market and are working with other parts of the supply chain to scale up)
Flow batteries, air batteries and fuel cells. These are almost the same concept. You have a chemical reaction that makes electricity with a circular resource like hydrogen, methane, ammonia, or electrolyte. Downside is most versions require a prohibitive amount of some metal like rutheneum or vanadium or something. Not a fundamental limit, but not sure it will be a great avenue as research goes back a fair ways. Aluminum-air batteries are one interesting concept. Essentially turning Al smelters into fuel production facilities. Keywords iron-air aluminum-air, redox-flow, direct methane fuel cell, ammonia fuel cell, ammonia cracking, nickel fuel cell.
Molten salt batteries. Incredibly simple, cheap and scalable concept that has no problems with dendrites (and so theoretically no cycle limit) with one limitation on portability (they must be hot, sloshing is bad) and one as yet insurmountable deal breaking flaw (incredibly corrosive material next to an airtight insulating seal). Look up Ambri for details of an attempt which has presumably failed by now. There is a more recent attempt using a much lower temperature salt and sodium sulfur which shows promise. Keywords ambri, sodium sulfur battery.
Thermochemical:
Any variation on burning stuff you didn't dig up.
Hydrogen is hard to store more than a few days worth, but underground caverns could help. I expect a massive scandal about fugitive hydrogen, toxicity and greenhouse effect in the 2030s sometime. It's borderline competitive to make now. Main limitation is cost of energy (solved by more wind and solar and more 4 hour storage) and cost of capital (platinum/palladium/rutheneum/nickel are usually required). Lots of work going on to reduce the latter and to increase power density and efficiency. If you were directing a billion dollars of public funds this would probably be the place to put it. Keywords $200/kw electrolyser, hysata 95% efficient.
Methane, ammonia, dimethyl ether, methanol, etc. These are all far easier to store than hydrogen. Production needs large scale but is borderline viable already if you have cheap hydrogen. Keywords ammonia energy storage, synthetic fuels, efuels, green ammonia, direct ammonia electrolysis.
Then there's virtual batteries.
Many loads like aluminum smelting can be much more variable than they are now. Rearranging workflows such that they can scale up or down by 50% and change worker tasks to suit has the same function as storage during any period where consumption isn't zero. EV's can kinda fit here too and kinda fit actual storage (especially if they power other things)
Biofuels. Not technically storage, more dispatchable, but it serves a similarfunction. Bagasse is an option for a few percent of power. Waste stream methane is a possibility for a couple % of power. Limited by the extremely low efficiency of photosynthesis so something PV based will likely be a better way of making hydrocarbons from air and sunlight. Most other 'biofuels' are either fossil fuels with extra steps or ways of getting paid green energy credits for burning native forests. Some grad student might surprise us by creating a super-algae that's 10% efficient and doesn't all get eaten if there's a single bacterium in the room. Detangling it all is hard, but I wouldn't be surprised if wind + solar + biofuels + reigning in the waste was enough -- it certainly works for some people doing off grid.
I'd expect a system based on sodium ion (or even lithium) batteries and synthetic fuels to render any fossil fuel mix unviable in the next decade or two. More scalable batteries or scalable fuel cells would hasten this somewhat.
CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage)
"Compressed air storage vs. lead-acid batteries" (2022) https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/21/compressed-air-storag... :
> Researchers in the United Arab Emirates have compared the performance of compressed air storage and lead-acid batteries in terms of energy stored per cubic meter, costs, and payback period. They found the former has a considerably lower CAPEX and a payback time of only two years.
FWIU China has the first 100MW CAES plant; and it uses some external energy - not a trompe or geothermal (?) - to help compress air on a FWIU currently ~one-floor facility.
Couldn't CAES tanks be filled with CO2/air to fight battery fires?
A local CO2 capture unit should be able to fill the tanks with extra CO2 if that's safe?
Should there be a poured concrete/hempcrete cask to set over burning batteries? Maybe a preassembled scaffold and "grid crane"?
How much CO2 is it safe to flood a battery farm with with and without oxygen tanks after the buzzer due to detected fire/leak? There could be infrared on posts and drones surrounding the facility.
Would it be cost-advisable to have many smaller tanks and compressors; each in a forkable, stackable, individually-maintainable IDK 40ft shipping container? Due to: pump curves for many smaller pumps, resilience to node failure?
If CAES is cheaper than the cheapest existing barriers, it can probably be made better with new-gen ultralight hydrogen tanks for aviation, but for air ballast instead?
Do submarines already generate electricity from releasing ballast?
(FWIW, like all modern locomotives - which are already diesel-electric generators - do not yet have regenerative braking.)
PostgresML is 8-40x faster than Python HTTP microservices
Python is slow for ML. People will take time to realize it. The claim that most of the work is done in GPU -- covers only a small fraction of cases.
For example, in NLP a huge amount of pre and post processing of data is needed outside of the GPU.
Spacy is much faster on the GPU. Many folks don't know that Cudf (a Pandas implementation for GPUs) parallelizes string operations (these are notoriously slow on Pandas)... shrug...
Apache Ballista and Polars do Apache Arrow and SIMD.
The Polars homepage links to the "Database-like ops benchmark" of {Polars, data.table, DataFrames.jl, ClickHouse, cuDF*, spark, (py)datatable, dplyr, pandas, dask, Arrow, DuckDB, Modin,} but not yet PostgresML? https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/
Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?
I've tried switching from IDEs like VSCode to Emacs (with evil mode) a few times now, but I always gave up after a while because my productivity decreases. Even after 1-2 weeks it's still not close to what it was with VScode. That's frustrating. But when I watch proficient people using these editors I'm always amazed at what they can do, and they appear more productive than I am with VSCode. So with enough effort it should be a worthwhile investment.
I think my problem is the lack of a structured guide/tutorial focused on real-world project usage. I can do all basic operations, but I'm probably doing them in an inefficient way, which ends up being slower than a GUI. But I don't know what I don't know, so I don't know what commands and keybindings I should use instead or what my options are.
How did you become good at using these editors? Just using them doesn't really work because by myself I'd never discover most of the features and keybindings.
>How did you become good at using these editors? Just using them doesn't really work because by myself I'd never discover most of the features and keybindings.
I used Vim (GVim to be specific) as part of my job in a semiconductor industry. Everybody in our team used it and we'd help each other. My recollection is not 100% sure, but I think nobody knew how awesome user manuals were (start with vimtutor and then go through `:h usr_toc.txt` https://vimhelp.org/usr_toc.txt.html a few times).
I've also collected a list of Vim resources here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/vim.html
For Emacs, check out https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap
A document with notes on the software tool https://westurner.github.io/tools/#vim :
- [x] SpaceVim, SpaceMacs
- [ ] awesome-vim > Learning Vim https://github.com/akrawchyk/awesome-vim#learning-vim
- [x] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/vim/
- [ ]
:help help
:h help
:h usr_toc.txt
:help noautoindent
:help Command-line-mode
:help Ex-mode
The VSCode GitLab extension now supports getting code completions from FauxPilot
GitLab team member here.
This work was produced by our AI Assist SEG (Single-Engineer Group)[0]. The engineer behind this feature recently uploaded a quick update about this work and other things they are working on to YouTube[1].
[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/ai-...
Why do you call this a group? Why don't you say "one of our engineers did this"? I read the linked article [1] and that seems to be the accurate situation: not a group of people including one engineer, not one engineer at a time on a rotation, but literally one person. In what way is that a group?
[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#single-engi...
Great question. I'm not entirely clear on the origin of the name and it would probably be hard for me to find the folks behind this decision on Friday evening/Saturday so I'll share my interpretation.
At GitLab, we have a clearly defined organizational structure. Within that stucture, we have Product Groups[0] which are groups of people aligned around a specific category. The name "Single-Engineer Groups" reflects that this single engineer owns the category which they're focusing on.
I'll be sure to surface your question to the leader of our Incubation Engineering org. Thanks.
[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#product-gro...
jesus christ john, i cant wrap my head around the concept of single-person group!! haha
Gitlab is 600Kloc of JS and 1.8Mloc of Ruby. Of course a SEG would make sense to them.
OpenAPI, tests, and {Ruby on Rails w/ Script.aculo.us built-in back in the day, JS, and rewrite in {Rust, Go,}}? There's dokku-scheduler-kubernetes; and Gitea, a fork of Gogs, which is a github clone in Go; but Gitea doesn't do inbound email to Issues, Service Desk Issues, or (Drone,) CI with deploy to k8s revid.staging and production DNS domains w/ Ingress.
You Can Now Google the Balances of Ethereum Addresses
Looks like the data is from Etherscan.io .
Ethereum in BigQuery: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/ethereu... and the ETL scripts: https://github.com/blockchain-etl/ethereum-etl
cmorqs-public/cmorq-eth-data in BigQuery: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/cmorqs-...
blockchain-etl/awesome-bigquery-views has example SQL queries for querying the BigTable copy of the Ethereum blockchain: https://github.com/blockchain-etl/awesome-bigquery-views
Jupyter Notebooks showing how to query the Ethereum BigQuery Public Dataset:
/? Ethereum Kaggle: https://www.google.com/search?q=ethereum+kaggle
Blender: Wayland Support on Linux
I don't know much about the whole space, but from what I've read so far about Wayland, it starts to feel a lot like yet another "perpetual next-gen" tech, such as IPv6, fuel cells, the Semantic Web or XHTML2 (before that one was officially declared dead at least).
Like, according to the linked article, the standard is out there since 2008 - so the adoption period is already 14 years! And people are still haggling about basic stuff like color management, mouse cursors and window decorations?
What exactly is the envisioned timeframe for Wayland to replace X11 as the dominant windowing system?
If the standard has been promoted as the obvious next step for linux desktop environments for 14 years but still hasn't actually caught on, are we sure it really is the right direction to go?
I cannot say for sure that it is true, but I read (about a year ago) that about 90% of Linux users are already on Wayland.
I tend to believe it because I've seen news reports as of 3 years ago saying that Xserver is no longer being maintained.
The change from Xserver to an arrangement using Wayland is transparent to the Linux user (and Linux admin) and I heard that most of the major distros made the transition a few years ago. A corollary of that, if it is true, is that some of the many Linux users appearing on this site to attack Wayland are in fact (unknown to themselves) using Wayland.
Specifically, the "display server" (terminology? I mean the software that talks to the graphics driver and the graphics hardware) on most distros these days uses the Wayland protocol to talk to apps. An app that have not been modified to use the Wayland protocol to talk to the display server is automatically given a "connection" (terminology?) to XWayland, whose job is to translate the X protocol to the Wayland protocol.
I think `printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE` will tell you whether you are running Wayland or the deprecated Xserver.
The OP begins, "Recently we have been working on native Wayland support on Linux." What that means is that the blender app no longer needs XWayland: it can talk directly to the display server (using the Wayland protocol). There are certain advantages to that: one advantage is that you can configure all the UI elements on your screen to be scaled by an arbitrary factor without everything getting blurry.
I'm using the latest MacOS to make this comment, but for over a year until a few weeks ago, I was using Linux for all my computing needs, and I went out of my way to run only apps that used the Wayland protocol to talk to the display server (because of the aforementioned ability to scale the UI without blurriness). Chrome had to be started with certain flags for it to use the Wayland protocol. To induce Emacs to speak Wayland, I had to use a special branch of the git source repo, called feature/pgtk.
Do you think Apple will ever contribute XQuartz back to the X11 / X.org open source community?
XQuartz has been a part of X.Org since forever
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/master/hw...
Xpra: Multi-platform screen and application forwarding system for x11
I do almost all my computing through Xpra these days. Being able to combine windows seamlessly from multiple VMs is a much more usable way to segregate workloads, and Xpra doesn't suffer from the same security (and increasingly compatibility) issues of X forwarding.
Same here. I wish I could do the same with a Windows VM and a remote MacOS host.
Have you heard of any such solutions?
There used to be a hack for getting integrated windows using Remote Desktop, but I can't remember the name of it anymore and Google isn't finding much :( Hopefully someone remembers (and it's still maintained).
Edit: Found it: https://github.com/rdesktop/seamlessrdp. Seems like there are probably more modern solutions now though.
IIRC WinSwitch + xpra could do seamless windows: http://winswitch.org/documentation/faq.html#protocols http://winswitch.org/about/ :
> Window Switch is a tool which allows you to display running applications on other computers than the one you start them on. Once an application has been started via a winswitch server, it can be displayed on other machines running winswitch client, as required.
> You no longer need to save and send documents to move them around, simply move the view of the application to the machine where you need to access it.
Wikipedia/Neatx links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remmina (C) :
> It supports the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), VNC, NX, XDMCP, SPICE, X2Go and SSH protocols and uses FreeRDP as foundation.
But no xpra, for which Neatx has old python 2 scripts.
Retinoid restores eye-specific brain responses in mice with retinal degeneration
The retina is a very complex structure. I’m skeptical that if major damage happens to the structure, like wet macular degeneration or in retinal diseases like PIC, that the structure can ever function again.
Given that every body is capable of creating two working retina, why would you think it can’t re-create at least one working retina?
It clearly doesn’t know that the need exists. We have to find the right set of commands and hack the body to re-create one. But the procedure exists even if it involves retina removal and 5+ years of new retina growth (from infant to child).
Null hypothesis: A Nanotransfection (vasculogenic stromal reprogramming) intervention would not result in significant retinal or corneal regrowth
... With or without: a nerve growth factor, e.g. fluoxetine to induce plasticity in the adult visual cortex, combination therapy with cultured conjunctival IPS, laser mechanical scar tissue evisceration and removal, local anesthesia, robotic support, Retinoid
Nanotransfection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection :
> Most reprogramming methods have a heavy reliance on viral transfection. [22][23] TNT allows for implementation of a non-viral approach which is able to overcome issues of capsid size, increase safety, and increase deterministic reprogramming
How to turn waste polyethylene into something useful
From "Argonne invents reusable sponge that soaks up oil, could revolutionize oil spill and diesel cleanup" (2017) https://www.anl.gov/article/argonne-invents-reusable-sponge-... :
> [...] The scientists started out with common polyurethane foam, used in everything from furniture cushions to home insulation. This foam has lots of nooks and crannies, like an English muffin, which could provide ample surface area to grab oil; but they needed to give the foam a new surface chemistry in order to firmly attach the oil-loving molecules.
> Previously, Darling and fellow Argonne chemist Jeff Elam had developed a technique called sequential infiltration synthesis, or SIS, which can be used to infuse hard metal oxide atoms within complicated nanostructures.
> After some trial and error, they found a way to adapt the technique to grow an extremely thin layer of metal oxide “primer” near the foam’s interior surfaces. This serves as the perfect glue for attaching the oil-loving molecules, which are deposited in a second step; they hold onto the metal oxide layer with one end and reach out to grab oil molecules with the other.
> The result is Oleo Sponge, a block of foam that easily adsorbs oil from the water. The material, which looks a bit like an outdoor seat cushion, can be wrung out to be reused—and the oil itself recovered.
> At tests at a giant seawater tank in New Jersey called Ohmsett, the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility, the Oleo Sponge successfully collected diesel and crude oil from both below and on the water surface.
From "Reusable Sponge for Mitigating Oil Spills" https://www.energy.gov/science/bes/articles/reusable-sponge-... :
> A new foam called the Oleo Sponge was invented that not only easily adsorbs oil from water but is also reusable and can pull dispersed oil from an entire water column, not just the surface. Many materials can grab oil, but there hasn't been a way, until now, to permanently bind them into a useful structure. The scientists developed a technique to create a thin layer of metal oxide "primer" within the interior surfaces of polyurethane foam. Scientists then bound oil-loving molecules to the primer. The resulting block of foam can be wrung out to be used, and the oil itself recovered.
EU Passes Law to Switch iPhone to USB-C by End of 2024
Self-regulation only works if government regulation is a serious threat in case self-regulation fails. In this case, self-regulation failed, so government regulation stepped in to force industry to do what is right.
All the handwringing about stifling innovation is on its face ridiculous as mandates to use micro-usb didn't stop android phones from adopting the new and better standard as soon as it was viable.
All the handwringing about stifling innovation is on its face ridiculous as mandates to use micro-usb didn't stop android phones from adopting the new and better standard as soon as it was viable.
I'm not sure I understand your logic here. Android phones were able to quickly move to micro USB because they weren't restricted from doing so by a government regulation.
If there was a government mandate requiring phones to have whatever connector came before micro USB, wouldn't that have prevented the Android phones from changing connectors/choosing the new innovation?
Or was there a location where micro USB was required by law before, and since I don't live there, I wasn't affected by it?
Edit: Strike that last sentence, since I see in other responses that there was, indeed, a location where micro USB was mandated. So my new question is: How does a company change to a new/better connector, if it's required by law to use an old connector?
Edit edit: Looks like other responses show there was no mandate, that's just something that people on HN assume. It was a recommendation, not a law, like it is now.
> If there was a government mandate requiring phones to have whatever connector came before micro USB, wouldn't that have prevented the Android phones from changing connectors/choosing the new innovation?
Dunno, we have a test case tho: how'd the Micro-B to USB-C transition go in EU markets?
Vulhub: Pre-Built Vulnerable Environments Based on Docker-Compose
Most of these compose files are pretty outdated AND they depend on non-standard builds of containers for each respective application.
What else would you expect for setups intentionally trying to preserve past versions of software?
Reproducibility in [Infosec] Software Research requires DevOpSec, which requires: explicit data and code dependency specifications, and/or trusting hopefully-immutable software package archives, and/or securely storing and transmitting crytographically-signed archival (container) images; and then Upgrade all of the versions and run the integration tests with a git post-receive hook or a webhook to an external service dependency not encapsulated within the {Dockerfile, environment.yml/requirements.txt/postBuild; REES} dependency constraint model.
With pip-tools, you update the python software versions in a requirements.txt from a requirements.in meta-dependency-spec-file: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools#updating-requirements
$ pip-compile --upgrade requirements.in
$ cat requirements.tct
From https://pipenv.pypa.io/en/latest/basics/#pipenv-lock :
$ pipenv lock
"Reproducible builds" of a DVWA Deliberately Vulnerable Web Application is a funny thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
Replication crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis :
> The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
Just rebuilding or re-pulling a container image does not upgrade the versions of software installed within the container. See also: SBOM, CycloneDx, #LinkedReproducibility, #JupyterREES.
`podman-pull` https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-pull.1.html... ~:
podman image pull busybox
podman pull busybox
docker pull busybox
podman pull busybox centos fedora ubuntu debian
docker-compose up -d --no-deps --build #[servicename]
awesome-vulnerable-apps > OWASP Top 10 https://github.com/vavkamil/awesome-vulnerable-apps#owasp-to... :
> OWASP Juice Shop: Probably the most modern and sophisticated insecure web application
And there's a book, an Open Source Official Companion Guide book titled "Pwning Juice Shop": https://github.com/juice-shop/juice-shop#official-companion-...
If the versions installed in the book are outdated, you too can bump the version strings in the dependency specs in the git repo and send a PR Pull Request (which also updates the Screenshots and Menu > Sequences and Keyboard Shortcuts in the book&docs); and then manually test that everything works with the updated "deps" dependencies.
If it's an executablebooks/, a Computational Notebook (possibly in a Literate Computing style), you can "Restart & Run all" from the notebook UI button or a script, and then test that all automated test assertions pass, and then "diff" (visually compare), and then just manually read through the textual descriptions of commands to enter (because people who buy a Book presumably have a reasonable expectation that if they copy the commands from the book to a script by hand to learn them, the commands as written should run; it should work like the day you bought it for a projected term of many free word-of-mouth years.
From https://github.com/juice-shop/juice-shop#docker-container :
docker pull bkimminich/juice-shop
docker run --rm -p 3000:3000
podman pull bkimminich/juice-shop
podman run --rm -p 3000:3000 -n juiceshop0I have read this multiple times and can still not figure out what you are trying to say and how it is related to OPs comment...
> Most of these compose files are pretty outdated AND they depend on non-standard builds of containers for each respective application.
>> What else would you expect for setups intentionally trying to preserve past versions of software?
So, I wrote about reproducibility in software; and Software Supply Chain Security. Specifically, how to do containers and keep the software versions up to date.
Are you challenging the topicality of my comment on HN - containing original research - to be facetious?
Bash 5.2
@jhamby on Twitter is currently refactoring bash to c++, and it's really interesting to read anecdotes about it and read about the progress. It's a really interesting codebase.
c2rust https://github.com/immunant/c2rust :
> C2Rust helps you migrate C99-compliant code to Rust. The translator (or transpiler), c2rust transpile, produces unsafe Rust code that closely mirrors the input C code. The primary goal of the translator is to preserve functionality; test suites should continue to pass after translation.
crust https://github.com/NishanthSpShetty/crust :
> C/C++ to Rust transpiler
"CRustS: A Transpiler from Unsafe C to Safer Rust" (2022) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:WIDYx_PvgNoJ:sc...
rust-bindgen https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen/ :
Automatically generates Rust FFI bindings to C (and some C++) libraries
nushell/nushell looks like it has cool features and is written in rust.
awesome-rust > Applications > System Tools https://github.com/rust-unofficial/awesome-rust#system-tools
awesome-rust > Libraries > Command-line https://github.com/rust-unofficial/awesome-rust#command-line
rust-shell-script/rust_cmd_lib https://github.com/rust-shell-script/rust_cmd_lib :
> Common rust command-line macros and utilities, to write shell-script like tasks in a clean, natural and rusty way
hey thanks for this I didn't know it existed. I'm still kind of a rust noob and working my way through Rust in action and various examples.
Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support current content blockers
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: indicate that DNS is locally overridden by entries in /etc/hosts
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: Browser UI: indicate that a domain does not have DNSSEC record signatures
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBT: Browser UI: indicate whether DNS is over classic UDP or DoH, DoT, DoQ (DNS-over-QUIC)
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: browser: indicate that a page is modified by extensions; show a "tamper bit"
- [ ] ENH,SEC: Devtools?: indicate whether there are (matching) HTTP SRI Subresource Integrity signatures for any or some of the page assets
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UBY: a "DNS Domain(s) Information" modal_tab/panel like the Certificate Information panel
Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers
Google made a faux-pas with this one...
Their stated goal is to improve the performance of the web request blocking API.
Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions.
They should have made extensions get auto-disabled if they 'slow down web page loading too much'. Set the threshold for that to be say more than a 20% increase in page load time, but make the threshold decrease with time - eg. 10% in 2023, 5% in 2024, 2% in 2025, to finally 1% in 2026 etc.
Eventually, that would achieve both of Googles goals - since adblockers would be forced to shorten their lists of regex'es, neutering them, and performance would increase at the same time. Extension developers would have a hard time complaining, because critics will always argue they just have bloated inefficient code.
eWASM opcodes each have a real cost. It's possible to compile {JS, TypeScript, C, Python} to WASM.
What are some ideas for UI Visual Affordances to solve for bad UX due to slow browser tabs and extensions?
- [ ] UBY: Browsers: Strobe the tab tab or extension button when it's beyond (configurable) resource usage thresholds
- [ ] UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tab tabs according to their relative resource utilization
- [ ] ENH,SEC: Browsers: specify per-tab/per-domain resource quotas: CPU, RAM, Disk, [GPU, TPU, QPU] (Linux: cgroups,)
> Their (unstated but suspected) goal is to neuter adblocking chrome extensions.
Except they didn't. There's already 3-4 adblockers that work perfectly as far as blocking ads is concerned. They do lose more advanced features, but 99.9% of people with adblockers installed never ever touch those features.
To claim that this neuters adblocking is truly ridiculous. It also ignores that Safari has the exact same restrictions yet no one complains that Apple wanted to neuter ad blocking.
> 99.9% of people with adblockers installed never ever touch those [advanced features]
Custom matching algorithms and ability to fine tune or expand matching algorithms according to new content blocking challenges are actually a kind of advanced feature that are used by all those users without them ever realizing it since their content blocker work seamlessly on their favorite sites without the need for intervention.
The declarativeNetRequest (DNR) API has been quite improved since it was first announced and its great, but since it's the only one we can use now, it's no longer possible to innovate by coming up with improved matching algorithm for network requests.
If the DNR had been designed 8 years ago according to the requirements of content blockers back then, it would be awfully equipped to deal with the challenges thrown at content blockers nowadays, so it's difficult to think the current one will be sufficient in the coming years.
Nothing stops the API evolving... Anyone can make a build of Chromium with a better API, test it out with their own extension, and if it works better, then they can send a PR to get that API into Chrome.
Obviously, extending an API is a long term commitment, so I can understand the Chrome team wanting to only do it if there is a decent benefit - "it makes my one extension with 10 users work slightly better" probably doesn't cut it.
> Nothing stops the API evolving... Anyone can make a build of Chromium with a better API, test it out with their own extension, and if it works better, then they can send a PR to get that API into Chrome.
This is not at all how API proposals are handled. There are a lot more (time, financial, logical) barriers to a change like this. See the role of the W3C in this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/11/manifest-v3-open-web-p...
It is reasonable to expect BPF or a BPF-like filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Packet_Filter
bromite/build/patches/Bromite-AdBlockUpdaterService.patch: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/blob/master/build/patches...
bromite/build/patches/disable-AdsBlockedInfoBar.patch: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/blob/master/build/patches...
bromite/build/patches/Bromite-auto-updater.patch: () https://github.com/bromite/bromite/blob/master/build/patches...
- [ ] ENH,SEC,UPD: Bromite,Chromium: is there a url syntax like /path.tar.gz#sha256=cba312 that chromium http filter downloader could use to check e.g. sha256 and maybe even GPG ASC signatures with? (See also: TUF, Sigstore, W3C Blockcerts+DIDs)
Bromite/build/patches/Re-introduce-*.patch: [...]
1Hz CPU made in Minecraft running Minecraft at 0.1fps [video]
Cool! Now build it in Turing Complete and export it to an FPGA
From KiCad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiCad :
> KiCad is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). It facilitates the design and simulation of electronic hardware. It features an integrated environment for schematic capture, PCB layout, manufacturing file viewing, SPICE simulation, and engineering calculation. Tools exist within the package to create bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D models of the PCB and its components.
https://www.kicad.org/discover/spice/ :
> KiCad integrates the open source spice simulator ngspice to provide simulation capability in graphical form through integration with the Schematic Editor.
PySpice > Examples: https://pyspice.fabrice-salvaire.fr/releases/v1.6/examples/i... :
+ Diode, Rectifier (AC to DC), Filter, Capacitor, Power Supply, Transformer, [Physical Relay Switche (Open/Closed) -> Vacuum Tube Transistor -> Solid-state [MOSFET,]] Transistor,
From the Ngspice User's Manual https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/docs/ngspice-37-manual.pdf :
> Ngspice is a general-purpose circuit simulation program for nonlinear and linear analyses.*
> Circuits may contain resistors, capacitors, inductors, mutual inductors, independent or dependent voltage and current sources, loss-less and lossy transmission lines, switches, uniform distributed RC lines, and the five most common semiconductor devices: diodes, BJTs, JFETs, MESFETs, and MOSFETs.
> [...] Ngspice has built-in models for the semiconductor devices, and the user need specify only the pertinent model parameter values. [...] New devices can be added to ngspice by several means: behavioral B-, E- or G-sources, the XSPICE code-model interface for C-like device coding, and the ADMS interface based on Verilog-A and XML.
Turing completeness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness :
> In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing-complete" and "Turing-equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language. In real life this leads to the practical concepts of computing virtualization and emulation. [citation needed]
> Real computers constructed so far can be functionally analyzed like a single-tape Turing machine (the "tape" corresponding to their memory); thus the associated mathematics can apply by abstracting their operation far enough. However, real computers have limited physical resources, so they are only linear bounded automaton complete. In contrast, a universal computer is defined as a device with a Turing-complete instruction set, infinite memory, and infinite available time.
Church–Turing thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis ... Lamda calculus (Church): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
HDL: Hardware Description Language > Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language#...
HVL: Hardware Verification Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_verification_language
awesome-electronics > Free EDA Packages: https://github.com/kitspace/awesome-electronics#free-eda-pac...
https://github.com/TM90/awesome-hwd-tools
EDA: Electronic Design Automation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation
More notes for #Q12:
Quantum complexity theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory#Back... :
> A complexity class is a collection of computational problems that can be solved by a computational model under certain resource constraints. For instance, the complexity class P is defined as the set of problems solvable by a Turing machine in polynomial time. Similarly, quantum complexity classes may be defined using quantum models of computation, such as the quantum circuit model or the equivalent quantum Turing machine. One of the main aims of quantum complexity theory is to find out how these classes relate to classical complexity classes such as P, NP, BPP, and PSPACE.
> One of the reasons quantum complexity theory is studied are the implications of quantum computing for the modern Church-Turing thesis. In short the modern Church-Turing thesis states that any computational model can be simulated in polynomial time with a probabilistic Turing machine. [1][2] However, questions around the Church-Turing thesis arise in the context of quantum computing. It is unclear whether the Church-Turing thesis holds for the quantum computation model. There is much evidence that the thesis does not hold. It may not be possible for a probabilistic Turing machine to simulate quantum computation models in polynomial time. [1]
> Both quantum computational complexity of functions and classical computational complexity of functions are often expressed with asymptotic notation. Some common forms of asymptotic notion of functions are \Omega(T(n)) and \Theta(T(n)).
> \Theta(T(n)) expresses that something is bounded above by cT(n) where c is a constant such that c>0 and T(n) is a function of n, \Omega(T(n)) expresses that something is bounded below by cT(n) where c is a constant such that c>0 and T(n) is a function of n, and \Theta(T(n)) expresses both O(T(n)) and \Omega(T(n)). [3] These notations also their own names. O(T(n)) is called Big O notation, \Omega(T(n)) is called Big Omega notation, and \Theta(T(n)) is called Big Theta notation.
Quantum complexity theory > Simulation of quantum circuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_complexity_theory#Simu... :
> There is no known way to efficiently simulate a quantum computational model with a classical computer. This means that a classical computer cannot simulate a quantum computational model in polynomial time [P]. However, a quantum circuit of S(n) qubits with T(n) quantum gates can be simulated by a classical circuit with O(2^{S(n)}T(n)^{3}) classical gates. [3] This number of classical gates is obtained by determining how many bit operations are necessary to simulate the quantum circuit. In order to do this, first the amplitudes associated with the S(n) qubits must be accounted for. Each of the states of the S(n) qubits can be described by a two-dimensional complex vector, or a state vector. These state vectors can also be described a linear combination of its component vectors with coefficients called amplitudes. These amplitudes are complex numbers which are normalized to one, meaning the sum of the squares of the absolute values of the amplitudes must be one. [3] The entries of the state vector are these amplitudes.
Quantum Turing machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Turing_machine
Quantum circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_circuit
Church-Turing-Deutsch principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93...
Computational complexity > Quantum computing, Distributed computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity#Quant...
Hash collisions and exploitations – Instant MD5 collision
MD5 > History, Security > Collision vulnerabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#Collision_vulnerabilities
AI Seamless Texture Generator Built-In to Blender
Is there a way to run things like this with an AMD graphics card? Every Stable Diffusion project I've seen seems to be CUDA focused.
That's because Stable Diffusion is built with PyTorch. Which isn't optimized for anything but CUDA. Even the CPU is a second class citizen there. Let alone AMD or other graphics.
Not saying PyTorch doesn't run on anything else. You can but those will lag and some will be hackish.
Looks like Nvidia is on its way to be the next Intel.
From the Arch wiki, which has a list of GPU runtimes (but not TPU or QPU runtimes) and arch package names: OpenCL, SYCL, ROCm, HIP,: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GPGPU :
> GPGPU stands for General-purpose computing on graphics processing units.
- "PyTorch OpenCL Support" https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/488
- Blender re: removal of OpenCL support in 2021 :
> The combination of the limited Cycles split kernel implementation, driver bugs, and stalled OpenCL standard has made maintenance too difficult. We can only make the kinds of bigger changes we are working on now by starting from a clean slate. We are working with AMD and Intel to get the new kernels working on their GPUs, possibly using different APIs (such as CYCL, HIP, Metal, …).
- https://gitlab.com/illwieckz/i-love-compute
- https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
- https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/clang-ocl
AMD ROCm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROCm
AMD ROcm supports Pytorch, TensorFlow, MlOpen, rocBLAS on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs: https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learni...
RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm_Documentation: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm_Documentation
ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY :
> hipify-clang is a clang-based tool for translating CUDA sources into HIP sources. It translates CUDA source into an abstract syntax tree, which is traversed by transformation matchers. After applying all the matchers, the output HIP source is produced.
ROCmSoftwarePlatform/gpufort: https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/gpufort :
> GPUFORT: S2S translation tool for CUDA Fortran and Fortran+X in the spirit of hipify
ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP:
> HIP is a C++ Runtime API and Kernel Language that allows developers to create portable applications for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from single source code. [...] Key features include:
> - HIP is very thin and has little or no performance impact over coding directly in CUDA mode.
> - HIP allows coding in a single-source C++ programming language including features such as templates, C++11 lambdas, classes, namespaces, and more.
> - HIP allows developers to use the "best" development environment and tools on each target platform.
> - The [HIPIFY] tools automatically convert source from CUDA to HIP.
> - * Developers can specialize for the platform (CUDA or AMD) to tune for performance or handle tricky cases.*
Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors and Computing in 1833
Timeline of Quantum Computing (1960-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing_...
1960-1883 = 77 years later
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31996743 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31996743 :
> Qubit#Physical_implementations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Physical_implementations
> - note the "electrons" row of the table
>> See also: "Quantum logic gate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate
macOS Subsystem for Linux
You can just use Vagrant for this kind of setup. The benefit of that is you can provision so it is able to run your application and you're able to commit it to git and share it with others. Pretty sure it will have a qemu adapter too if you so choose.
brew install vagrant packer terraform
brew install podman-desktop
You get all that put together one time on one box and realize you could have scripted the whole thing, but you need bash 4+ or Python 3+ so it all depends on `brew` first: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-for-kubernetes/blob/m...
The Ansible homebrew module can install and upgrade brew and install and upgrade packages with brew: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit...
And then write tests for the development environment too, or only for container specs in production: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-for-kubernetes/tree/m... :
brew install kind docker
type -a python3; python3 -m site
python3 -m pip install molecule ansible-test yamllint
# molecule converge; ssh -- hostname
molecule test
# molecule destroy
Perhaps not that OT, but FWIW I just explained exactly this in a tweet:
> Mambaforge-pypy3 for Linux, OSX, Windows installs from conda-forge by default. (@condaforge builds packages with CI for you without having to install local xcode IIRC)
conda install -c conda-forge -y nodejs
mamba install -y nodejsGlobal-Chem: A Free Dictionary from Common Chemical Names to Molecules
TIL about #cheminformatics and Linked Data (Semantic Web):
Cheminformatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheminformatics
https://github.com/topics/cheminformatics :
- https://github.com/hsiaoyi0504/awesome-cheminformatics #Databases #See_also
- https://github.com/mcs07/PubChemPy :
> PubChemPy provides a way to interact with PubChem in Python. It allows chemical searches by name, substructure and similarity, chemical standardization, conversion between chemical file formats, depiction and retrieval of chemical properties.
http://chemicalsemantics.com/introduction-to-the-chemical-se... ... /? chemicalsemantics github ... https://github.com/semanticchemistry/semanticchemistry #See_also :
> The Chemical Information Ontology (CHEMINF) aims to establish a standard in representing chemical information. In particular, it aims to produce an ontology to represent chemical structure and to richly describe chemical properties, whether intrinsic or computed.
Looks like they developed the CHEMINF OWL ontology in Protege 4 (which is Open Source). /ontology/cheminf-core.owl: https://github.com/semanticchemistry/semanticchemistry/blob/...
- Does it -- the {sql/xml/json/graphql, RDFS Vocabulary, OWL Ontology} schema - have more (C)Classes and (P)Properties than other schema for modeling this domain?
- What namespaced strings and URIs does it specify for linking entities internally and externally?
LOV Linked Open Vocabularies maintains a database of many RDFS vocabularies and OWL ontologies (which are represented in RDF) https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/terms?q=chemical
- "The Linking Open Data Cloud" (2007-) https://lod-cloud.net/
/? "cheminf" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,43&qsp=1&q...
/? "cheminf" ontology https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,43&qsp=1&q...
"The ChEMBL database as linked open data" (2013) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1029919691588310633... ... citations:
"PubChem substance and compound databases" (2017) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7847099277060264658...
"5 Star Linked Data⬅" https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineerin...
Thing > BioChemEntity https://schema.org/BioChemEntity
Thing > BioChemEntity > ChemicalSubstance https://schema.org/ChemicalSubstance
Thing > BioChemEntity > MolecularEntity https://schema.org/MolecularEntity
Thing > BioChemEntity > Protein https://schema.org/Protein
Thing > BioChemEntity > Gene https://schema.org/Gene
Some of the BioSchemas work [1] is proposed and pending inclusion in the Schema.org RDFS vocabulary [2].
[1] https://github.com/bioschemas
[2] https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1028
Will newer Bioschema terms like BioSample, LabProtocol, SequenceAnnotation, and Phenotype be proposed for inclusion into the Schema.org vocabulary?: https://bioschemas.org/profiles/index#nav-draft
GCC's new fortification level: The gains and costs
Unfortunately not much in the way of performance measurements :(
It's on my TODO list. Watch out for Fedora change proposals for (hopefully) Fedora 38.
What if you develop inside of a Fedora 38 Docker container
FROM quay.io/fedora/fedora:38
RUN dnf install -y <bunch of tools>
It's not a runtime flag, you'll have to patch redhat-rpm-config to use _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 instead of 2 and then build packages with it.
Of course if you only want to build your application with _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3, you can do it right away even on Fedora 36. The Fedora change will be to build the distribution (or at least a subset of packages) with _FORGIFY_SOURCE=3.
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
Which attributes of a person are necessary to answer a legal question?
Python:
def has_legal_right(person: dict, right: str): -> bool
assert person
assert right
#
return NotImplementedError
def have_equal_rights(persons: list): -> bool
return NotImplementedError
function hasRight(person, right) {
console.assert(person);
console.assert(right);
// return true || false;
}
function haveEqualRights(persons) {
// return true || false;
}
... Therefore you've failed at the Law of Reciprocity.
U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech
Does this mean that newspaper Information Service Providers are now obligated to must-carry opinion pieces from political viewpoints that oppose those of the editors in the given district?
Does this mean that newspapers in Texas are now obligated to carry liberal opinion pieces? Equal time in Texas at last.
Must-carry provision of a contract for service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must-carry
I imagine they'd have to accept arbitrary submissions first. If you just worked there, probably they'd be forced to put up anything you wrote
no
How limited is the given district court of appeals case law precedent in regards to must-carry and Equal time rules for non-licensed spectrum Information Service providers? Are they now common carrier liability, too?
Equal time rules and American media history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
Who pays for all of this?
> "Give me my free water!"
From "FCC fairness doctrine" (1949-1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine :
> The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been cited as a contributing factor in the rising level of party polarization in the United States. [5][6]
Because the free flow of information is essential to democracy, it is in the Public Interest to support a market of new and established flourishing information service providers, not a market of exploited must-carry'ers subject to district-level criteria for ejection or free water for life. Shouldn't all publications, all information services be subject to any and all such Equal Time and Must-Carry interpretations?
Your newspaper may not regulate viewpoints: in its editorial section or otherwise. Must carry. Equal time.
The wall of one's business, perhaps.
You must keep that up there on your business's wall.
**
In this instance, is there a contract for future performance? How does Statute of Frauds apply to contracts worth over $500?
Transformers seem to mimic parts of the brain
Sincere question inspired purely by the headline: how many important ML architectures aren't in some way based on some proposed model of how something works in the brain?
(Not intended as a flippant remark, I know Quanta Magazine articles can generaly safely be assumed to be quality content, and that this is about how a language model unexpectedly seems to have relevance for understanding spatial awareness)
I think the response to this has two prongs:
- Some families of ML techniques (SVMs, random forests, gaussian processes) got their inspiration elsewhere and never claimed to be really related to how brains do stuff.
- Among NNs, even if an idea takes loose inspiration from neuroscience (e.g. the visual system does have a bunch of layers, and the first ones really are pulling out 'simple' features like an edge near an area), I think it's relatively uncommon to go back and compare specifically what's happening in the brain with a given ML architecture. And a lot of the inspiration isn't about human-specific cognitive abilities (like language), but is really a generic description of neurons which is equally true of much less intelligent animals.
> I think it's relatively uncommon to go back and compare specifically what's happening in the brain with a given ML architecture.
Less common but not unheard of. Here's one example, primarily on focused on vision: http://www.brain-score.org/
DeepMind has also published works comparing RL architectures like IQN to dopaminergic neurons.
The challenge is that its very cross-disciplinary and most DL labs don't have a reason to explore the neuroscience side while most neuro labs don't have the expertise in DL.
Is it necessary to simulate the quantum chemistry of a biological neural network in order to functionally approximate a BNN with an ANN?
A biological systems and fields model for cognition:
Spreading activation in a dynamic graph with cycles and magnitudes ("activation potentials",) that change as neurally-regulated heart-generated electron potentials (and,) reverberate fluidically with intersecting paths. And a partially extra-cerebral induced field which nonlinearly affects the original signal source through local feedback; Representational shift.
Representational shift: "Neurons Are Fickle. Electric Fields Are More Reliable for Information" (2022) https://neurosciencenews.com/electric-field-neuroscience-201...
Spreading activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreading_activation
Re: 11D (11-Dimensional) biological network hyperparameters, ripples in (hippocampal, prefrontal,) association networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18218504
M-theory String theory is also 11D, but IIUC they're not the same dimensions
Diffusion suggests fluids, which in physics and chaos theory suggests Bernoulli's fluid models (and other non-differentiable compact descriptions like Navier-Stokes), which are part of SQG Superfluid Quantum Gravity postulates.
Can e.g. ONNX or RDF with or without bnodes represent a complete connectome image/map?
Connectome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectome
Wave Field recordings are probably the most complete known descriptions of the brain and its nonlinear fields?
How such fields relate to one or more Quantum Wave functions might entail near-necessity of QFT: Quantum Fourier Transform.
When you replace the Self-attention Network part of a Transformer algorithm with classical FFT Fast Fourier Transform: ... From https://medium.com/syncedreview/google-replaces-bert-self-at... :
> > New research from a Google team proposes replacing the self-attention sublayers with simple linear transformations that “mix” input tokens to significantly speed up the transformer encoder with limited accuracy cost. Even more surprisingly, the team discovers that replacing the self-attention sublayer with a standard, unparameterized Fourier Transform achieves 92 percent of the accuracy of BERT on the GLUE benchmark, with training times that are seven times faster on GPUs and twice as fast on TPUs."
> > Would Transformers (with self-attention) make what things better? Maybe QFT? There are quantum chemical interactions in the brain. Are they necessary or relevant for what fidelity of emulation of a non-discrete brain?
> Quantum Fourier Transform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Fourier_transform
The QFT acronym annoyingly reminds ne rather of Quantum Field Theory than Quantum Fourier Transforms ...
Yeah. And resolve QFT + { QG || SQG }
A more useful query, to Google dork:
/? QFT "field theory" "Superfluid" "quantum gravity" https://www.google.com/search?q=QFT+%22field+theory%22+%22Su... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=QFT+%22field+theory%22+...
/? QFT "field theory" "Superfluid quantum gravity" https://www.google.com/search?q=QFT+%22field+theory%22+%22Su... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=QFT+%22field+theory%22+...
Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return
This sounds similar to work I did years ago to combine phase-space manifolds with a rule-based expert system to address problems diagnosing failures in mechanical systems exhibiting multi-modal operating regimes.
Hopefully the researchers found a simpler computational method than I did in trying to mate those two systems together. :)
What really caught my attention was the output of a probability curve showing how the system might operate in the never-before-seen regimes once the tipping point was reached. The ability to predict behavior outside the training set is a huge win. My method was only predictive while the the system operated in the training regime; outside that regime it was useless.
Could this detect/predict/diagnose e.g. mechanical failures in engines and/or motors, and health conditions, given sensor fusion?
Sensor fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_fusion
Steady state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state :
> In many systems, a steady state is not achieved until some time after the system is started or initiated. This initial situation is often identified as a transient state, start-up or warm-up period. [1]
https://github.com/topics/steady-state
Control systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system
https://github.com/topics/control-theory
Flap (disambiguation) > Computing and networks > "Flapping" (nagios alert fatigue,) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flap
Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) > Distinctions from engineering control theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory :
> In the artificial systems that are specified by engineering control theory, the reference signal is considered to be an external input to the 'plant'.[7] In engineering control theory, the reference signal or set point is public; in PCT, it is not, but rather must be deduced from the results of the test for controlled variables, as described above in the methodology section. This is because in living systems a reference signal is not an externally accessible input, but instead originates within the system. In the hierarchical model, error output of higher-level control loops, as described in the next section below, evokes the reference signal r from synapse-local memory, and the strength of r is proportional to the (weighted) strength of the error signal or signals from one or more higher-level systems. [26]
> In engineering control systems, in the case where there are several such reference inputs, a 'Controller' is designed to manipulate those inputs so as to obtain the effect on the output of the system that is desired by the system's designer, and the task of a control theory (so conceived) is to calculate those manipulations so as to avoid instability and oscillation. The designer of a PCT model or simulation specifies no particular desired effect on the output of the system, except that it must be whatever is required to bring the input from the environment (the perceptual signal) into conformity with the reference. In Perceptual Control Theory, the input function for the reference signal is a weighted sum of internally generated signals (in the canonical case, higher-level error signals), and loop stability is determined locally for each loop in the manner sketched in the preceding section on the mathematics of PCT (and elaborated more fully in the referenced literature). The weighted sum is understood to result from reorganization.
> Engineering control theory is computationally demanding, but as the preceding section shows, PCT is not. For example, contrast the implementation of a model of an inverted pendulum in engineering control theory [27] with the PCT implementation as a hierarchy of five simple control systems. [28]
Structural Equation Modeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_equation_modeling https://github.com/topics/structural-equation-modeling
ros2_control https://control.ros.org/master/index.html
Limit cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_cycle
Finite Element Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_element_method
> #FEM: Finite Element Method (for ~solving coupled PDEs Partial Differential Equations)
> #FEA: Finite Element Analysis (applied FEM)
awesome-mecheng > Finite Element Analysis: https://github.com/m2n037/awesome-mecheng#fea
GraphBLAS
> When applied to sparse adjacency matrices, these algebraic operations are equivalent to computations on graphs
Sparse matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_matrix :
> The concept of sparsity is useful in combinatorics and application areas such as network theory and numerical analysis, which typically have a low density of significant data or connections. Large sparse matrices often appear in scientific or engineering applications when solving partial differential equations.
CuGraph has a NetworkX-like API, though only so many of the networkx algorithms are yet reimplemented with some possible CUDA-optimizations.
From https://github.com/rapidsai/cugraph :
> cuGraph operates, at the Python layer, on GPU DataFrames, thereby allowing for seamless passing of data between ETL tasks in cuDF and machine learning tasks in cuML. Data scientists familiar with Python will quickly pick up how cuGraph integrates with the Pandas-like API of cuDF. Likewise, users familiar with NetworkX will quickly recognize the NetworkX-like API provided in cuGraph, with the goal to allow existing code to be ported with minimal effort into RAPIDS.
> While the high-level cugraph python API provides an easy-to-use and familiar interface for data scientists that's consistent with other RAPIDS libraries in their workflow, some use cases require access to lower-level graph theory concepts. For these users, we provide an additional Python API called pylibcugraph, intended for applications that require a tighter integration with cuGraph at the Python layer with fewer dependencies. Users familiar with C/C++/CUDA and graph structures can access libcugraph and libcugraph_c for low level integration outside of python.
/? sparse https://github.com/rapidsai/cugraph/search?q=sparse
Pandas and scipy and IIRC NumPy have sparse methods; sparse.SparseArray, .sparse.; https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/sparse.html#sparse...
From https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/sparse.html#intera... :
> Series.sparse.to_coo() is implemented for transforming a Series with sparse values indexed by a MultiIndex to a scipy.sparse.coo_matrix.
NetworkX graph algorithms reference docs https://networkx.org/documentation/stable/reference/algorith...
NetworkX Compatibility > Differences in Algorithms https://docs.rapids.ai/api/cugraph/stable/basics/nx_transiti...
List of algorithms > Combinatorial algorithms > Graph algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_algorithms#Graph_algor...
To give an example of real world sparse matrices, power grids can have thousands and thousands of nodes, but most of those nodes only connect to a few other nodes at most that are local neighbors. Systems are highly sparse as a result
Integer factor graphs are sparse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_graph#Message_passing_o...
Compared to the Powerset graph that includes all possible operators and parameter values and parentheses in infix but not Reverse Polish Notation, a correlation graph is sparse: most conditional probabilities should be expected to tend toward the Central Limit Theorem, so if you subtract (or substitute) a constant noise scalar, a factor graph should be extra-sparse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem_for_dire...
What do you call a factor graph with probability distribution functions (PDFs) instead of float64s?
Are Path graphs and Path graphs with cycles extra sparse? An adjacency matrix for all possible paths through a graph is also mostly zeroes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_graph
Methods of feature reduction use and affect the sparsity of a sparse matrix (that does not have elements for confounding variables). For example, from "Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) versus principal components analysis (PCA)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis :
> For either objective, it can be shown that the principal components are eigenvectors of the data's covariance matrix. Thus, the principal components are often computed by eigendecomposition of the data covariance matrix or singular value decomposition of the data matrix. PCA is the simplest of the true eigenvector-based multivariate analyses and is closely related to factor analysis. Factor analysis typically incorporates more domain specific assumptions about the underlying structure and solves eigenvectors of a slightly different matrix.
Common Lisp names all sixteen binary logic gates
From File:Logical_connectives_Hasse_diagram.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logical_connectives_...:
> Description: The sixteen logical connectives ordered in a Hasse diagram. They are represented by:
> - logical formulas
> - the 16 elements of V4 = P^4({})
> - Venn diagrams
> The nodes are connected like the vertices of a 4 dimensional cube. The light blue edges form a rhombic dodecahedron - the convex hull of the tesseract's vertex-first shadow in 3 dimensions.
Hasse diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasse_diagram
> A research question for a new school year: (2021, still TODO)
> The classical logical operators form a neat topology. Should we expect there to be such symmetry and structure amongst the quantum operators as well?
From Quantum Logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic :
> Quantum logic can be formulated either as a modified version of propositional logic or as a noncommutative and non-associative many-valued (MV) logic.[2][3][4][5][6]
> Quantum logic has been proposed as the correct logic for propositional inference generally, [...] group representations and symmetry.
> The more common view regarding quantum logic, however, is that it provides a formalism for relating observables, system preparation filters and states.[citation needed] In this view, the quantum logic approach resembles more closely the C*-algebraic approach to quantum mechanics. The similarities of the quantum logic formalism to a system of deductive logic may then be regarded more as a curiosity than as a fact of fundamental philosophical importance. A more modern approach to the structure of quantum logic is to assume that it is a diagram—in the sense of category theory—of classical logics
Quantum_logic#Differences_with_classical_logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic#Differences_with...
Cirq > Gates and operations: https://quantumai.google/cirq/build/gates
Cirq > Operators and Observables: https://quantumai.google/cirq/build/operators
qiskit-terra/qiskit/circuit/operation.py Interface: https://github.com/Qiskit/qiskit-terra/blob/main/qiskit/circ...
tequila/src/tequila/circuit/gates.py: https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila/blob/master/src/tequil...
Pauli matrices > Quantum information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_matrices#Quantum_informa...
From Quantum_information#Quantum_information_processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information#Quantum_in... :
> The state of a qubit contains all of its information. This state is frequently expressed as a vector on the Bloch sphere. This state can be changed by applying linear transformations or quantum gates to them. These unitary transformations are described as rotations on the Bloch Sphere. While classical gates correspond to the familiar operations of Boolean logic, quantum gates are physical unitary operators.
Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says
Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence.
For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will say it has 2 billion results, yet if you try to go to result 500, you can't, it will stop at 400, then change the number to 400 results only on the last page.
This happens for every query. Google lies about the astronomical number of search results, then only shows a few hundred at most.
I work for Google Search. The counts we show for results are estimated. They get more refined when you go deeper into the results. But yes, there are still likely to be millions of results for many things you query -- and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. So we show usually up to around 40 pages / 400 of these. We have a help page about this here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785
So when I google "cows" and it says "Page 2 of about 1,210,000,000 results" you know full well you aren't going to show anywhere near 1,201,000,000 results yet you program it to display that? And in fact it only shows "about 231 results" which is 0.000019234% of 1,210,000,000 results.
That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.
How is it misleading? It's an estimate of the total results, it doesn't say it's going to display them
"I'll sell you about 1,201,000,000 paper clips."
"OK."
ships 231 paper clips
"Hey I only got 231 paper clips, not 1,201,000,000."
"That's right. 1,201,000,000 was an estimate."
"You said about. So you estimated 1,201,000,000 paper clips but you actually only had 231?"
"No, I had the full 1,201,000,000. I sold them to you but I didn't say I would ship all of them. What kind of idiot uses more than a few hundred paper clips anyway? Plus, it saves us money on shipping costs."
You haven't paid Google for search: there is no sale of product or service to you, the user using free services for free.
You haven't signed any agreement with Google for search services. Google hasn't signed any agreement for future performance with you.
Google is not obligated to count every search result of every free search query. You are not entitled to such resource-intensive queries.
How much does COUNT() on a full table scan of billions of rows - with snippets - cost you on BigQuery or a similar pay-for-query-resources service?
>> you, the user using free services for free
Absolutely false, it is not free. I have provided them with my data which they will monetize.
It's the same as Hacker News not being free. I have provided Hacker News with my personal data.
For example, if you look through my post history just in the last day or so, you would know that Rufus Foreman owns a killer cis-gendered cat named Mr. Tiddlesworth, that Rufus Foreman is a Warren Buffett fan boy, and that when thinking of a generic search term to use as an example, the first thing to come to Rufus Foreman's mind is "cows".
Now imagine what sort of dark patterns an unscrupulous corporation like say, Hooli, could implement in order to target me with advertising tailored to my preferences!
If you tell the bartender your life story, they don't owe you free drinks (and they might as well sell a screenplay)
While it's true that they sell the data they collect, you can choose to not share such data and still receive the free services. "Bromite" is a fork of Chromium, for example.
If you spend time in their store and cause loss and order a bunch of free waters, do the Terms of Service even apply to you? What can they even do? What can LinkedIn do about scraping and resale of every public profile page?
Give me some free privacy on my free dsl line. (Note that ISPs can sell the entirety of a customer's internet PCAPs, for example, due to Pai's FCC rescinding a Wheeler FCC privacy rule https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill... "Trump signs repeal of U.S. broadband privacy rules" (2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-trump/trump-... )
Bromite is not a Google service. It's a false precedence that anything open source from a corporation is a free service and makes their anti-privacy stance good. That's like saying a criminal is a good guy because he did 50 hours of charity work after murdering 2 people.
You can use the Chromium source code that Google contributes to, to browse the internet with and without ads and trackers that use obvious domain names: Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Bromite, ungoogled-chromium, Brave, Chrome.
You choose whether to shop at Google.
Google buying the default search engine position in browsers does not prevent users from changing the - possibly OpenSearch - browser search engine to DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.
You can force an address bar entry to a.tld/search=?${query} search w/:
Ctrl-L
?${query}
?how to change the default search engine
?how to block ads & trackers in {browser name}
?how to provide free search queries on a free search engine and have positive revenue after years of debt obligations to fairly build market share
Why would they now get out of paying for Firefox development using a revenue model, too?
(Competitors can and do use e.g. google/bazel the open source clone of google/blaze, which is what Chromium builds were built with before gn. Here's Chromium/BUILD.bazel, for example: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/v8/v8.git/+/master:BUIL... )
Android (and /e/ and LineageOS) do allow you to install browsers other than the Chrome WebView and Chrome. Is it possible to install anything other than Safari (WebKit) on iOS devices? Maybe from another software repository like F-droid? Hopefully current downstream releases with signed manifests and SafetyNet scanning uploaded apps
> You haven't signed any agreement with Google for search services.
Literally on absolutely every google search page: https://policies.google.com/terms
No one read terms and conditions, yes?
Terms of Service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service
Statute of Frauds applies to agreements regarding amounts over $500. Is this a conscionable agreement between which identified parties? Does what satisfy chain of custody requirements for criminal or civil admissability if the data is from not a trustless system but a centralized trustful system?
"Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data" (2019) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
And then the interplay between a "Right to be Forgotten" and the community legal obligation to retain for lawful investigative law enforcement purposes. They don't know what they want: easy investigations, compromisable investigations, privacy
Ask HN: Best empirical papers on software development?
There are some good empirical papers, but I only know very few. What is your best empirical paper on software development?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_software_engineer... :
> Experimental software engineering involves running experiments on the processes and procedures involved in the creation of software systems, with the intent that the data be used as the basis of theories about the processes involved in software engineering (theory backed by data is a fundamental tenet of the scientific method). A number of research groups primarily use empirical and experimental techniques.
> The term empirical software engineering emphasizes the use of empirical studies of all kinds to accumulate knowledge. Methods used include experiments, case studies, surveys, and using whatever data is available.
(CS) Papers We Love > https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-good-... :
- "Systematic Review in Software Engineering" (2005)
-- "The Developed Template for Systematic Reviews in Software Engineering"
- "Happiness and the productivity of software engineers" (2019)
DevTech Research Group (Kibo, Scratch Jr,) > Publications https://sites.bc.edu/devtech/publications/
' > Empirical Research, instruments: https://sites.bc.edu/devtech/about-devtech/empirical-researc...
"SafeScrum: Agile Development of Safety-Critical Software" (2018) > A Summary of Research https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9208467786713301421... (Gscholar features: cited by, Related Articles) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-99334-8_...
Re: Safety-Critical systems, awesome-safety-critical, and Formal Verification as the ultimate empirical study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709239
Why public chats are better than direct messages
As I read this, I got the sinking feeling that I'd read it all before. But then I realised, it's just another case of someone thinking that their specific solution is best, solely on the basis that it worked for them, in their specific circumstances.
But here's the thing: every group is different, has different needs, and will respond differently to different styles of communication. Some people (especially people not using their first language) can find working in public stressful; some people get very stressed by the intensity of 1:1s. It takes all types, and as a manager, understanding how to get the best out of everyone is part of the job.
There is no single, correct way, and we know this because, if there was, then we wouldn't keep hearing about these interminable "solutions".
Yes, but so is which is best for which situation still the question?
Presuming that information asymmetry will hold over time is a bad assumption, regardless of cost of information security controls.
Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not?
Instead of Chat or IM, hopefully working on Issues with checkbox Tasks and Edges; and Pull Requests composed of Commits, Comments, and Code Reviews; with conditional Branch modification rules; will produce Products: deliverables of value to the customer, per the schema:Organization's Mission.
What style of communication is appropriate for a team in which phase of development, regardless of communications channel?
> Why have these new collaborative innovative services succeeded where NNTP and > > indented, text-wrapped email forwards for new onboards have not?
The new tools we have at our disposal are amazing. Of course they are better. But they are just tools. They don’t solve any problems relating to interpersonal communication any more than a hammer solves building a house.
> What style of communication is appropriate for a team in which phase of development, regardless of communications channel?
It’s the job of a manager to work that out. There is no formula. It’s not even possible to write one down. That’s the point.
Well, our societies value these communication businesses as among the most valuable corporations on Earth, so I think that there's probably some value in the tools that people suffer ads on to get for free.
"Traits of good remote leaders" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24432088 :
"From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" (2009) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2... :
> "Table 4 – Correlation of Development Phases, Coping Stages and Comfort Zone transitions and the Performance Model" in "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" White (2008) tabularly correlates the Tuckman group development phases (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning) with the Carnall coping cycle (Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, Internalization) and Comfort Zone Theory (First Performance Level, Transition Zone, Second Performance Level), and the White-Fairhurst TPR model (Transforming, Performing, Reforming). The ScholarlyArticle also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages.
Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
"Hemp twice as effective at capturing carbon as trees, UK researcher says" (2021) https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-as-effective-at-cap... :
> “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.”
> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
> Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp “offers an incredible scope to grow a better future” while producing fewer emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per hectare than forestry.
"Cities of the future may be built with algae-grown limestone" (2022) https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-may-... :
> And limestone isn’t the only product microalgae can create: microalgae’s lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-products—helping to offset the costs of limestone production.
Carbon sequestration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
tonnes of carbon per hectare is not relevant.
What you need is tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.
We don't have enough space to let these plants be there, we need to convert them into coal and throw it back into the mines.
The efficient thing to do is render them into charcoal, yes.
Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
Biochar is also intensive and only converts a relatively small amount of that carbon into stable charcoal.
Hemp is compostable, though because it's so tough, shredding and waiting for it to compost trades (vertical) space & time for far less energy use than biocharification unless it's waste heat from a different process.
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) > Biomass feedstocks doesn't have a pivot table of conversion efficiencies?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... :
> Biomass sources used in BECCS include agricultural residues & waste, forestry residue & waste, industrial & municipal wastes, and energy crops specifically grown for use as fuel. Current BECCS projects capture CO2 from ethanol bio-refinery plants and municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling center.
> A variety of challenges must be faced to ensure that biomass-based carbon capture is feasible and carbon neutral. Biomass stocks require availability of water and fertilizer inputs, which themselves exist at a nexus of environmental challenges in terms of resource disruption, conflict, and fertilizer runoff.
If you keep taking hemp off a field without leaving some down, you'll probably need fertilizer (see: KNF, JADAM,) and/or soil amendments to be able to rotate something else through; though it's true that hemp grows without fertilizer.
> A second major challenge is logistical: bulky biomass products require transportation to geographical features that enable sequestration. [27]
Or more local facilities
Composting oxidizes a lot of the carbon. And since you have to replant, harvest and fertilise everyyear it is a lot more intensive than forestry where you do that ever 30 (15-100) years
Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim that they would be even more effective because they can grow incredibly fast.
I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really solve the problem.
We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuries).
> I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber.
This is why hempcrete is ideal. But hemp, by comparison, doesn't result in a root-bound tree farm for wind break and erosion control; hemp can be left down to return nutrients to the soil or for soil remediation as it's a very absorbent plant (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil and into the plant)
Why hempcrete when you could use wood?
> Hemp can be left down to return nutrients to the soil or for soil remediation as it's a very absorbent plant (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil and into the plant)
It won't remove heavy metals from the soil if you leave it there. You also can't turn it into a product if you leave it there.
Caddyhttp: Enable HTTP/3 by Default
lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy works like Traefik, in that Container metadata labels are added to the reverse proxy configuration which is reloaded upon container events, which you can listen to when you subscribe to a Docker/Podman_v3 socket (which is unfortunately not read only)
So, with Caddy or Traefik, a container label can enable HTTP/3 (QUIC (UDP port 1704)) for just that container.
"Labels to Caddyfile conversion" https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy#labels-to...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127879 re: containersec :
> > - [docker-socket-proxy] Creates a HAproxy container that proxies limited access to the [docker] socket
The point of the link in OP is that now in v2.6, Caddy enables HTTP/3 by default, and doesn't need to be explicitly enabled by the user.
So I'm not exactly sure the point you're trying to make. But yes, CDP is an awesome project!
That is a good point. Is there any way to disable HTTP/3 support with just config?
The (unversioned?) docs have: https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http#servers/experiment... :
> servers/experimental_http3: Enable experimental HTTP/3 support. Note that HTTP/3 is not a finished standard and has extremely limited client support. This field is not subject to compatibility promises
TIL caddy has Prometheus metrics support (in addition to automatic LetsEncrypt X.509 Cert renewals)
Yeah those docs are for v2.5. The experimental_http3 option is removed in v2.6 (which is currently only in beta, stable release coming soon). To configure protocols and disable HTTP/3, you'll now use the "protocols" option (inside of the "servers" global option), and it would look like "protocols h1 h2" (the default is "h1 h2 h3").
Yes, the docs have been updated at https://github.com/caddyserver/website but haven't been deployed yet. There is a new protocols option:
protocols h1 h2
For HTTP/3 support with python clients:
- aioquic supports HTTP/3 only now https://github.com/aiortc/aioquic
- httpx is mostly requests-compatible, supports client-side caching, and HTTP/1.1 & HTTP/2, and here's the issue for HTTP/3 support: https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/275
Make better decisions with fewer online meetings
Hi! I am the cofounder TopAgree. We have created TopAgree to help teams make faster decisions with fewer meetings. My friend Linus and I are developing it together because we often don't make the important decisions until the last five minutes of a meeting. And then, unfortunately, we often make the wrong decisions. I have a big request for you: Please comment when you like to test the product and give us feedback. Thanks so much! Kind regards, Bastian
Does it integrate into MS Teams? Or some other established enterprise platform?
Otherwise it’s really hard to introduce it to a corporation, where it’s probably most needed.
Webhook integrations: Slack/Mattermost; Zulip; Zapier Platform; GitHub Pull Requests
Another issue/checkbox:
Re: collaboration engineering, Thinklets: "No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157064
Thank you westurner for the link. Super helpful. Kind regards, Bastian
Great idea. IMHO, Feedback is necessary for #EvidenceBasedPolicy; for objective progress.
Evidence-based policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_policy (Jupyter, scikit-learn & Yellowbrick, Kaggle,)
Town hall meeting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_hall_meeting
awesome-ideation-tools: https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools :
> Awesome collection of brainstorming, problem solving, ideation and team building tools. From foresight to overcoming creative blocks, this list contains all the awesome boardgames, canvases and deck of cards that were designed to help you solve a certian problem.
Europe’s energy crisis hits science
How come there is nobody held responsible on the side of European regulators/politicians that led the continent into such dependency on fossil fuels with no backup supplier
Basically, the entire European green and anti-global warming movement was either delusional or bought off and there was (and still is) not really much of a counterbalance to this within the mainstream. They pushed for renewables that required a huge amount of natural gas as backup for when the wind dropped or the sun went behind clouds and for the shutdown of alternatives like coal and nuclear, whilst simultaneously campaigning to block new natural gas exploration and investment in Europe. This made energy supplies completely dependent on imports from totalitarian dictatorships. In addition, Germany chose to make themselves completely dependent on Russia specifically despite attempts by the US and eastern European countries to stop them and somehow arm-twisted the EU into letting them go ahead with this - but even if it wasn't for that, the natural gas capacity just isn't there to cope with Russia refusing to supply and there hasn't been the willingness to invest in building more.
I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all.
Germany produced 48% of its electricity via renewables this year so far. The surpluss energy will soon be used to electrolyze hydrogen that will be fed into our vast gas infrastructure.
What surplus? 48% is less than half, isn't it?
So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus?
In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables.
Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...
There often is a renewable energy surplus at night (wind /hydro) and more recently even around noon, thanks to solar. And renewables are constantly expanding.
The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage.
Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.
TIL that apparently Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) has the lowest cost of any method of energy storage? "Techno-economic analysis of bulk-scale compressed air energy storage in power system decarbonisation" (2021) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/21/compressed-air-storag... :
> They found the former has a considerably lower Capex and a payback time of only two years. [compared with Lead Acid batteries]
I wouldn't thought that a Gravity Battery would've been more efficient than compressed air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
Also TIL about geothermal heat pump energy storage: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-geothermal-ideal-energy-... :
The Risks of WebAssembly
Don't there need to be per- CPU/RAM/GPU quotas per WASM scope/tab? Or is preventing DOS with WASM out of scope for browsers?
IIRC, it's possible to check resource utilization in e.g. a browser Task Manager, but there's no way to do `nice` or `docker --cpu-quota` or `systemd-nspawn --cpu-affinity` to prevent one or more WASM tabs from DOS'ing a workstation with non-costed operations. FWIU, e.g. eWASM has opcode costs in particles/gas: https://github.com/ewasm/design/blob/master/determining_wasm...
Pypi.org is running a survey on the state of Python packaging
I didn't take the survey because I've never packaged anything for PyPI, but I wish all of the package managers would have an option for domain validated namespaces.
If I own example.com, I should be able to have 'pypi.org/example.com/package'. The domain can be tied back to my (domain verified) GitHub profile and it opens up the possibility of using something like 'example.com/.well-known/pypi/' for self-managed signing keys, etc..
I could be using the same namespace for every package manager in existence if domain validated namespaces were common.
Then, in my perfect world, something like Sigstore could support code signing with domain validated identities. Domain validated signatures make a lot of sense. Domains are relatively inexpensive, inexhaustible, and globally unique.
For code signing, I recognize a lot of project names and developer handles while knowing zero real names for the companies / developers involved. If those were sitting under a recognizable organizational domain name (example.com/ryan29) I can do a significantly better job of judging something's trustworthiness than if it's attributed to 'Ryan Smith Inc.', right?
That's a really interesting idea, but I worry about what happens when a domain name expires and is re-registered (potentially even maliciously) by someone else.
CT: Certificate Transparency logs log creation and revocation events.
The Google/trillian database which supports Google's CT logs uses Merkle trees but stores the records in a centralized data store - meaning there's at least one SPOF Single Point of Failure - which one party has root on and sole backup privileges for.
Keybase, for example, stores their root keys - at least - in a distributed, redundantly-backed-up blockchain that nobody has root on; and key creation and revocation events are publicly logged similarly to now-called "CT logs".
You can link your Keybase identity with your other online identities by proving control by posting a cryptographic proof; thus adding an edge to a WoT Web of Trust.
While you can add DNS record types like CERT, OPENPGPKEY, SSHFP, CAA, RRSIG, NSEC3; DNSSEC and DoH/DoT/DoQ cannot be considered to be universally deployed across all TLDs. Should/do e.g. ACME DNS challenges fail when a TLD doesn't support DNSSEC, or hasn't secured root nameservers to a sufficient baseline, or? DNS is not a trustless system.
EDNS (Ethereum DNS) is a trustless system. Reading EDNS records does not cost EDNS clients any gas/particles/opcodes/ops/money.
Blockcerts is designed to issue any sort of credential, and allow for signing of any RDF graph like JSON-LD.
List_of_DNS_record_types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNS_record_types
Blockcerts: https://www.blockcerts.org/ https://github.com/blockchain-certificates :
> Blockcerts is an open standard for creating, issuing, viewing, and verifying blockchain-based certificates
W3C VC-DATA-MODEL: https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/ :
> Credentials are a part of our daily lives; driver's licenses are used to assert that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to assert our level of education, and government-issued passports enable us to travel between countries. This specification provides a mechanism to express these sorts of credentials on the Web in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and machine-verifiable
W3C VC-DATA-INTEGRITY: "Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0" https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-integrity/#introduction :
> This specification describes mechanisms for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of Verifiable Credentials and similar types of constrained digital documents using cryptography, especially through the use of digital signatures and related mathematical proofs. Cryptographic proofs enable functionality that is useful to implementors of distributed systems. For example, proofs can be used to: Make statements that can be shared without loss of trust,
W3C TR DID (Decentralized Identifiers) https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/ :
> Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. A DID refers to any subject (e.g., a person, organization, thing, data model, abstract entity, etc.) as determined by the controller of the DID. In contrast to typical, federated identifiers, DIDs have been designed so that they may be decoupled from centralized registries, identity providers, and certificate authorities. Specifically, while other parties might be used to help enable the discovery of information related to a DID, the design enables the controller of a DID to prove control over it without requiring permission from any other party. DIDs are URIs that associate a DID subject with a DID document allowing trustable interactions associated with that subject.
> Each DID document can express cryptographic material, verification methods, or services, which provide a set of mechanisms enabling a DID controller to prove control of the DID. Services enable trusted interactions associated with the DID subject. A DID might provide the means to return the DID subject itself, if the DID subject is an information resource such as a data model.
For another example of how Ethereum might be useful for certificate transparency, there's a fascinating paper from 2016 called "EthIKS: Using Ethereum to audit a CONIKS key transparency log" which is probably way ahead of its time.
Abstract: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_...
Certificate Transparency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
/? "Certificate Transparency" Blockchain https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Certificate+Transpar... https://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=list_alert...
- Some of these depend upon a private QKD [fiber,] line
- NIST PQ algos are only just now announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32281357 : Kyber, NTRU, {FIPS-140-3}?
/? Ctrl-F "Certificate Transparency" https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ :
"Google's Certificate Transparency Search page to be discontinued May 15th, 2022" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781698
- LetsEncrypt Oak is also powered by Google/trillian, which is a trustful centralized database
- e.g. Graph token (GRT) supports Indexing (search) and Curation of datasets
> And what about indexing and search queries at volume, again without replication?
My understanding is that the s Sigstore folks are now more open to the idea of a trustless DLT? "W3C Verifiable Credentials" is a future-proof standardized way to sign RDF (JSON-LD,) documents with DIDs.
Verifiable Credentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials
# Reproducibile Science Publishing workflow procedures with Linked Data:
- Sign the git commits (GPG,)
- Sign the git tags (GPG+Sigstore, ORCID & DOI (-> W3C DIDs), FigShare, Zenodo,)
- Sign the package(s) and/or ScholarlyArticle & their metadata & manifest ( Sigstore, pkg_tool_xyz,CodeMeta RDF/JSON-LD, ),
- Sign the SBOM (CycloneDx, Sigstore,)
- Search for CVEs/vulns & Issues for everything in the SBOM (Dependabot, OSV,)
- Search for trusted package hashes for everything in the SBOM
- Sign the archive/VM/container image (Docker Notary TUF, Sigstore,)
- Archive & Upload & Restore & Verify (and then Upgrade Versions in the) from the dependency specifications, SBOM, and/or archive/VM/container image (VM/container tools, repo2docker (REES),)
- Upgrade Versions and run unit, functional, and integration tests ({pip-tools, pipenv, poetry, mamba}, pytest, CI, Dependabot,))
All poverty is energy poverty
"The Limits to Growth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
Carrying capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
> The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s.[1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.
Sustainable population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population :
> Talk of economic and population growth leading to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity for humans are popular in environmentalism.[16] The potential limiting factor for the human population might include water availability, energy availability, renewable resources, non-renewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and land availability for food production.[17] The applicability of carrying capacity as a measurement of the Earth's limits in terms of the human population has not been very useful, as the Verhulst equation does not allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits of population growth.[16]
> [...] The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population, which exists in a non-equilibrium, is criticized for not successfully being able to model the processes between humans and the environment.[16][20] In popular discourse the concept has largely left the domain of academic consideration, and is simply used vaguely in the sense of a "balance between nature and human populations".[20]
Practically, if you can find something sustainable to do with brine (NaCL; Sodium Chloride and), and we manage to achieve cheap clean energy, and we can automate humanoid labor, desalinating water and pumping it inland is feasible; so, global water prices shouldn't then be the limit to our carrying capacity. #Goal6 #CleanWater
Water trading > Alternatives to water trading markets (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading
LCOE: Levelized Cost of Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
LCOW: Levelized Cost of Water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_water
TIL about modern methods for drilling water wells on youtube: with a hand drill, with a drive cap and a sledgehammer and a pitcher-pump after a T with valves for an optional (loud) electric pump, or a solar electric water pump
Drinking water > Water Quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water#Water_quality :
> Nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide had access to tap water, while another 2.4 billion had access to wells or public taps.[3] The World Health Organization considers access to safe drinking-water a basic human right.
> About 1 to 2 billion people lack safe drinking water.[4] Water can carry vectors of disease. More people die from unsafe water than from war, then-U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in 2010.[5] Third world countries are most affected by lack of water, flooding, and water quality. Up to 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are the direct result of inadequate water and sanitation. [6]
A helpful risk hierarchy chart: "The risk hierarchy for water sources used in private drinking water supplies": From Lowest Risk to Highest Risk: Mains water, Rainwater, Deep groundwater, Shallow groundwater, Surface water
TIL it's possible to filter Rainwater with an unglazed terracotta pot and no electricity, too
Also, TIL about solid-state heat engines ("thermionic converters") with no moving parts, that only need a thermal gradient in order to generate electricity. The difference between #VantaBlack and #VantaWhite in the sun results in a thermal gradient, for example
Is a second loop and a heat exchange even necessary if solid-state heat engines are more efficient than gas turbines?
Any exothermic reaction?! FWIU, we only need 100°C to quickly purify water.
100°C will sterilise water but it won't purify it if there are inorganic pollutants in it.
One Serverless Principle to Rule Them All: Idempotency [video]
What does idempotency have to do with serverless?
That seems more like a general systems principle.
x ° x = x
> Idempotence is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application. The concept of idempotence arises in a number of places in abstract algebra (in particular, in the theory of projectors and closure operators) and functional programming (in which it is connected to the property of referential transparency).
"A comparison of idempotence and immutability" [immutable infrastructure] https://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/2484/a-comparison...
Ansible Glossary > Idempotency https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices... :
> Idempotency: An operation is idempotent if the result of performing it once is exactly the same as the result of performing it repeatedly without any intervening actions
Ask HN: IT Security Checklist for Startups?
Hi HN,
Does anyone have a list of IT security stuff that you should setup for your early stage startup?
Like for example DNSSEC, VPN, forcing employees to use 2-factor etc.
--- CIS Top 18: --- CIS have a top 18 critical security control checklist, which is pretty incredible.
https://www.cisecurity.org/controls/cis-controls-list
CIS Top 18 Version 8 works sequentially too, so you implement control 1 and it sets you up in a good place to then implement control 2, and so on.
--- Cyber Essentials: --- The UK's Cyber Essentials scheme is a certification standard (but you can ignore that and just use it as a checklist if you'd like).
It's designed for small to medium size organizations, and focused on getting the foundations right.
This would be a useful place to start but it won't cover some of the specific threats and risks associated with software/app development. See @snowstormsun's comment about OWASP Top 10 for that.
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/cyberessentials/overview
--- There's loads of other standards like this out there, that are free to use and are each focused on different security challenges etc.
I've shared these two standards as they both setup a solid foundation.
https://dev-sec.io/baselines/ has executable implementations of CIS and other guides
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30906310 :
> "The SaaS CTO Security Checklist [Redux]" https://github.com/vikrum/SecurityChecklists
> "The Personal Infosec & Security Checklist" https://www.goldfiglabs.com/guide/personal-infosec-security-...
> "The DevOps Security Checklist Redux" https://www.goldfiglabs.com/guide/devops-security-checklist/
Fed expects to launch long-awaited Faster Payments System by 2023
I'm starting to feel more hopeful about the US's digital infrastructure.
If this goes well instant payments will be available with no ACH 2 day withdrawal delay.
The IRS is exploring a system for people to file taxes online.
The State Department is building a system to renew your passport totally online.
I think the last two items are a result of the Inflation Reduction Act. I hope this momentum continues and we can continue making as many government services available digitally. While some will complain how bad these systems will be - I'd rather at least have them than not and allow them to improve.
The sooner the better.
Extremely sad we need to give the IRS $80 billion to accomplish something they should have provided decades ago.
You’re way off. The money earmarked for that project is $15 million, and it’s for a study on how the IRS would implement such a system.
$15 Million to “study”… “how they would implement it”
How should I say it, “come on man”?
Hey, I don't disagree government spending numbers can be crazy, but building a system for 330,000,000 people across 50 states that works flawlessly (and is responsible for trillions of dollars) isn't easy. I'm personally okay with $15M... that's like salaries for 25 people for two years.
To put that number into perspective, TurboTax spent about that much money on lobbying alone from 2018-2012.
> building a system for 330,000,000 people across 50 states that works flawlessly (and is responsible for trillions of dollars) isn't easy
Which is why they should pay real experts to do it. For less.
If I were an expert and the government came to me and my team with this project, I'd definitely charge at least $15M.
What do you think has been spent on developing Blockchain/DLT from 2007 to present? Is it more than $15m? Mostly amateur open source or corporate open source contributions?
- Bitcoin has an MIT License, for example
- XRPL and Stellar can do the payments volume; the TPS report; whereas otherwise you're building another Layer 2 system without Interledger.
- Flare does EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) Smart Contracts with XRPL; $<0.01/tx, network tx fees are just burned, 5 second transaction/ledger close time.
Notes re: Interledger addresses, SPSP, WebMonetization: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-32515531 ,
> From "NIST Special Publication 800-181 Revision 1: Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework)" (2020) https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-181r1 :
>> 3.1 Using Existing Task, Knowledge, and Skill (TKS) Statements
> (Edit) FedNOW should - like mCBDC - really consider implementing Interledger Protocol (ILP) for RTGS "Real-Time Gross Settlement" https://interledger.org/developer-tools/get-started/overview...
> From https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen... :
> Peering, Clearing and Settling; The Interledger network is a graph of nodes (connectors) that have peered with one another by establishing a means of exchanging ILP packets and a means of paying one another for the successful forwarding and delivery of the packets.
> […] Accounts and Balances: The edge between any two nodes (peers) is a communication link (for exchanging ILP packets and other data), and an account held between the peers (the Interledger account). The Interledger account has a balance denominated in a mutually agreed upon asset (e.g. USD) at an agreed upon scale (e.g. 2). The balance on the account is the net total of the amounts on any packets “successfully” routed between the peers.
> The balance on the Interledger account can only change as a result of two events:
> 1. The “successful” routing of an ILP packet between the two peers
> 2. A payment made between the peers on the underlying payment network they have agreed to use to settle the Interledger account
And then you realize you're sharing payment address information over a different but comparably-unsecured channel in a non-stanfardized way; From https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0009-simple-... :
> Relation to Other Protocols: SPSP is used for exchanging connection information before an ILP payment or data transfer is initiated
To do a complete business process, there's – e.g. TradeLens, GSBN, and – signaling around transactions, which then necessarily depends upon another - hopefully also cryptographically-secured and HA Highly Available - information system with API version(s) and database schema(s) unless there's something like Interledger SPSP Simple Payment Setup Protocol and Payment Pointers, which also solve for micropayments to accountably support creators; https://WebMonetization.org/ .
> What do you think has been spent on developing Blockchain/DLT from 2007 to present? Is it more than $15m? Mostly amateur open source or corporate open source contributions?
Are you kidding me? Hundreds of billions. a16z's last fund alone as $4.6B.
That money goes directly to developers.
What percentage (%) of the market cap, daily volume, or price gets contributed to, OTOH: (a) open source software development like code, tests, and docs; PRs: Pull Requests; (b) free information security review such as static and dynamic analysis; (c) marketing; (d) an open source software foundation; (e) offsetting long-term environmental costs through sustainable investment?
Are there other metrics for Software Quality & Infosec Assurances?
Honestly none of that is relevant.
The entirety of the investment made by VCs is given directly to developers. That's got nothing to do with daily volume, market cap, etc - that's cash in hand. Human dollars. What developers choose to spend that money on is up to them but they sure do seem to have found a way. Arbitrarily constraining the analysis to the 'free' part is disingenuous.
As for offsets, the entire model is bogus and I encourage you to look into it. It's generally just a way to prop up bad business models. You can't buy crime offsets from someone who promises not to do a crime they would have otherwise so that you can do it - and yet that's exactly how carbon offsetting works. That's to say nothing of that blockchain carbon offsetting company that set fire to the forest they were planting twice. [1]
[1] https://boingboing.net/2022/07/23/blockchain-based-carbon-of...
In your opinion, high quality Open Source Software is the result of VC money?
Chainslysis sells Blockchain/DLT analysis and investigation software and services to investigative agencies in multiple countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainalysis
How do they estimate their potential market?
"Crypto Crime Trends for 2022: Illicit Transaction Activity Reaches All-Time High in Value, All-Time Low in Share of All Cryptocurrency Activity" https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...
> In fact, with the growth of legitimate cryptocurrency usage far outpacing the growth of criminal usage, illicit activity’s share of cryptocurrency transaction volume has never been lower.
> […] Transactions involving illicit addresses represented just 0.15% of cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2021 despite the raw value of illicit transaction volume reaching its highest level ever. As always, we have to caveat this figure and say that it is likely to rise as Chainalysis identifies more addresses associated with illicit activity and incorporates their transaction activity into our historical volumes. For instance, we found in our last Crypto Crime Report that 0.34% of 2020’s cryptocurrency transaction volume was associated with illicit activity — we’ve now raised that figure to 0.62%. Still, the yearly trends suggest that with the exception of 2019 — an extreme outlier year for cryptocurrency-based crime largely due to the […] scheme — crime is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Law enforcement’s ability to combat cryptocurrency-based crime is also evolving. We’ve seen several examples of this throughout 2021, […]
> However, we also have to balance the positives of the growth of legal cryptocurrency usage with the understanding that $14 billion worth of illicit activity represents a significant problem. Criminal abuse of cryptocurrency creates huge impediments for continued adoption, heightens the likelihood of restrictions being imposed by governments, and worst of all victimizes innocent people around the world. In this report, we’ll explain exactly how and where cryptocurrency-based crime increased, dive into the latest trends amongst different types of cybercriminals, and tell you how cryptocurrency businesses and law enforcement agencies around the world are responding. But first, let’s look at a few of the key trends in cryptocurrency-based crime […]
"Mid-year Crypto Crime Update: Illicit Activity Falls With Rest of Market, With Some Notable Exceptions" (August 2022) https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/crypto-crime-midyear-up...
More concerned about the climate impact; about environmental sustainability: https://cryptoclimate.org/supporters/
And still, 99%+ of the market is incapable of assessing the software quality of the platforms underpinning the assets themselves, so we reach for some sort of market fundamentals technical data other than software quality and information security asurances.
> In your opinion, high quality Open Source Software is the result of VC money?
Some of it? Oh most definitely. It just depends on your business model and whether you need to keep your code proprietary. If you don't, good to go.
REPL Driven Minecraft
It would be interesting to render the images from the POV of a player in the world onto a large movie screen in game. Then other players could join in, go to the cinema and watch the live stream. Might be fun for game lobbies.
It's been done. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_VBO2WRpBrQ
"Public Minecraft: Pi Edition API Python Library" https://github.com/martinohanlon/mcpi
rendering-minecraft w/ mcpi might do offline / batch rendering? https://pypi.org/project/rendering-minecraft/
Jupyter-cadquery might be worth a look: https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery :
> View CadQuery objects in JupyterLab or in a standalone viewer for any IDE [w/ pythreejs]
If there's a JS port or WASM build of Minecraft, Minecraft could be rendered in a headless browser?
Nice, I wonder if the open source Minetest can be used instead of Minecraft.
Not really a REPL, but can inject code into a running minetest instance: https://github.com/Quiark/mtrepl/
A Jupyter kernel for Minecraft would be neat: https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/wrapperkerne... :
> You can re-use IPython’s kernel machinery to easily make new kernels. This is useful for languages that have Python bindings, such as Hy (see Calysto Hy), or languages where the REPL can be controlled in a tty using pexpect, such as bash.
Looks like there's a pytest-minecraft, too: https://pypi.org/project/pytest-minecraft/
/? Minecraft site:pypi.org https://pypi.org/search/?q=minecraft
SensorCraft is just the voxel designer part of Minecraft (like original Minecraft) with Pyglet for OpenGL: https://github.com/AFRL-RY/SensorCraft
Awhile back I looked into creating a Jupyter kernel for LDraw / LeoCAD / Bricklayer (SML) to build LEGO creations with code in the input cell of a notebook and render to the output cell, and put together some notes on Jupyter kernels that might be of use for creating a Minecraft / mcpi / SensorCraft Jupyter kernel: https://github.com/westurner/wiki/blob/master/bricklayer.md#...
- [ ] DOC: Jupyter-cadquery & pythreejs inspiration
- [ ] ENH: Minecraft Jupyter kernel (pytest-minecraft?,)
- [ ] ENH: mcpi Jupyter kernel
- [ ] ENH: SensorCraft Jupyter kernel
- [ ] ENH,BLD,DOC: SensorCraft: conda-forge environment.yml (target Mambaforge for ARM64 support, too)
- [ ] ENH,BLD,DOC: SensorCraft: build plaform-specific binary installer(s) with {CPython, all packages from environment.yml, Pyglet & OpenGL, } with e.g. Conda Constructor
- [ ] ENH,BLD,DOC: SensorCraft: reformat tutorials as Jupyter notebooks; for repo2docker, jupyter-book (template w/ repo2docker requirements.txt and/or conda/mamba environment.yml), & jupyter-lite, & VScode (because VSCode works on Win/Mac/Lin/Web and has Jupyter notebook support)
- [ ] ENH,BLD,DOC: SensorCraft: build a jupyter-lite build to run SensorCraft & Python & JupyterLab in WASM in a browser tab with no installation/deployment time cost
- [ ] ENH: SensorCraft: replace Pyglet (OpenGL) with an alternate WebGL/WebGPU implementation
Fast.ai's Practical Deep Learning for Coders Has Been Updated
"Practical Deep Learning for Coders" 2022: https://github.com/fastai/course22
"Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and Pytorch: AI Applications Without a PhD" (2020) https://github.com/fastai/fastbook
There's also a new nbdev; nbdev v2: https://github.com/fastai/nbdev and nbdev-template to start new projects with: https://github.com/fastai/nbdev-template
Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming
Can we 3d print e.g. geodesic domes to capture the waste methane (natural gas) from abandoned well sites?
"NASA Instrument Tracks Power Plant Methane Emissions" (2020) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia24019-nasa-instrument-tra... :: https://methane.jpl.nasa.gov/ (California,)
> NASA conducts periodic methane studies using the next-generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) instrument. These studies are determining the locations and magnitudes of the largest methane emission sources across California, including those associated with landfills, refineries, dairies, wastewater treatment plants, oil and gas fields, power plants, and natural gas infrastructure.
"NASA 3D Printed Habitat Challenge" (2019) @CentennialChallenge: 3d print [habitats] with little to no water and local ~soil. https://www.google.com/search?q=NASA+3D+Printed+Habitat+Chal...
What about IDK ~geodesic domes for capturing waste methane from abndanoned wells?
VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?
A warning for people who, like me, long ago disabled telemetry in Visual Studio Code: Microsoft introduced a new setting that deprecates the two older settings... and the new setting defaults to "all"[1]. I just noticed this now after double-checking my settings. Sneaky, sneaky, Microsoft (but still totally expected).
[1] https://imgur.com/a/RbrsuyA
You will want these three settings in your default settings JSON (the first two just to be safe):
{
"telemetry.enableTelemetry": false,
"telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false,
"telemetry.telemetryLevel": "off"
}Or just use VSCodium, the actually open source build, with no added closed source blobs and of course no telemetry.
It uses https://open-vsx.org, an open source host for VSX plugins.
Here's open-vsx's page for the Microsoft/vscode-jupyter extension: https://open-vsx.org/extension/ms-toolsai/jupyter
I think it's great that open license terms enable these sorts of forks and experiments so that the community can work together by sending pull requests.
Is there a good way to install code-server (hosted VSCode/vscodium in a browser tab) plugins from openvsx?
(E.g. the ml-workspace and ml-hub containers include code-server and SSH, which should be remotely-usable from vscodium?)
Learn to sew your own outdoor gear
I guess this is a good place to share my open source large format laser cutter design for sewing projects. It’s cheap to make, works pretty well, and the whole gantry assembly slides right off leaving just a sheet of plywood with low profile 3D printed rails on the sides. So I throw my rug over it and it becomes my floor when not in use. Important because the laser cutter can cut a full 60” wide piece of fabric two yards long. It’s basically 5 foot by 6 foot, and I don’t have space in my apartment for a dedicated machine that takes up all that space. But since this doubles as my floor it works great! Also includes a raspberry pi camera on the laser head which serves as a pattern scanner. I really want to finish my video on this thing, I’ve just been busy. But please take a look and considering building it! If you have any questions open a GitHub issue and I will do everything I can to help. I think it’s a great starting point (designed in three weeks) and I’d LOVE for other people to reproduce it and extend the design! The machine has a few hiccups but I use it all the time for my sewing projects and it is SO nice to get all the cutting done repeatably and automatically. You can even scan existing clothes often without disassembly and turn those in to digital patterns!
Could it tape seams for waterproofing?
This Solar LED umbrella could be a different fabric than cotton.
Just picked up a few tarps with a bunch of loops all around the sides and through the center for guidelines.
TIL hemp is antimicrobial and it can be mixed with {rayon,}.
Hmm I don’t know! That would be a great thing to experiment with!
FedNow FAQ
In India, we have UPI, a tokenized peer to peer payments network powered by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
Banks participate on the NPCI payment network.
I can assign a Virtual Payment Address (VPA) such as payxyz@mybank and give that VPA to anyone that needs to transfer funds to me. At the moment, there are no transaction fees with a transaction limit of INR 200,000 (approx. $2500). This makes it unnecessary to share any sensitive bank routing numbers / account numbers etc., One can create different VPAs for different purposes/payers.
UPI has had impressive growth in transaction volume (both # and monetary value) since its inception in 2016. https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics
The transfers are instantaneous (i.e., completed within seconds) and accounts debited/credited. The system works transparently across banks due to the network being managed by NPCI.
W3C ILP Interledger Protocol [1] specifies addresses [2]:
> Neighborhoods are leading segments with no specific meaning, whose purpose is to help route to the right area. At this time, there is no official list of neighborhoods, but the following list of examples should illustrate what might constitute a neighborhood:
> `crypto.` for ledgers related to decentralized crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or XRP.
> `sepa.` for ledgers in the Single Euro Payments Area.*
> `dev.` for Interledger Protocol development and early adopters
From "ILP Addresses - v2.0.0" [2]:
> Example Global Allocation Scheme Addresses
> `g.acme.bob` - a destination address to the account "bob" held with the connector "acme".
> `g.us-fed.ach.0.acmebank.swx0a0.acmecorp.sales.199.~ipr.cdfa5e16-e759-4ba3-88f6-8b9dc83c1868.2` - destination address for a particular invoice, which can break down as follows:
> - Neighborhoods: us-fed., ach., 0.
> - Account identifiers: acmebank., swx0a0., acmecorp., sales, 199 (An ACME Corp sales account at ACME Bank)
> - Interactions: ~ipr, cdfa5e16-e759-4ba3-88f6-8b9dc83c1868, 2
And from [3] "Payment Pointers and Payment Setup Protocols":
> The following payment pointers resolve to the specified endpoint URLS:
$example.com -> https://example.com/.well-known/pay
$example.com/invoices/12345 -> https://example.com/invoices/12345
$bob.example.com -> https://bob.example.com/.well-known/pay
$example.com/bob -> https://example.com/bob
<meta
name="monetization"
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[2] https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0015-ilp-add...
[3] "Payment Pointers and Payment Setup Protocols" https://interledger.org/rfcs/0026-payment-pointers/
This is one of the best things about living in Southeast Asia.
Instant bank transfers.
Because of this you csn just scan the QR code of your taxi, the fruit seller on the street, transfer to your friends.
Everyone gets it instantly.
Now this is not third party services. It’s bank account to bank account. As a result things like PayPal or Cash app make no sense in this part of the world and have no uptake here.
In fact it’s a downgrade to use those kinds of services.
Remembering the bank issues in North America is quite painful. Hope it really happens next year.
FedNow is for US, interbank transactions only.
Do your country's favorite banks implement ILP Interledger Protocol; to solve for more than just banks' domestic transactions between themselves? https://github.com/interledger/rfcs/blob/master/0001-interle...
Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
so much of my time is spent in chrome tabs / windows / and searches. someone's average chrome tab count is a badge of honor / horror. Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default. you can create tab groups for a session, or pin them so that they consume all your bandwidth and memory next time you open your session.
But that's not what i want.
i want rich bookmark behavior.
i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.
i'm not alone right?
I thought it was a commonly held thought that Google didn't want Chrome users using bookmarks because it directly competed with their search (and advertising).
I think that's venturing into tinfoil hat territory. More likely telemetry told them that some percentage > 50 always toggle the bookmark bar off and they decided to make it the default. It's still there on new tabs after all. Companies like Google are long term greedy, they don't make unpopular UX decisions for scraps.
Companies like Google are long term greedy, they don't make unpopular UX decisions for scraps.
Like not letting you add tags? not tagging definitely makes you use google search more.
"Do you like the browser bookmark manager?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511454 :
> Things I'd add to browser bookmark managers someday:
> - Support for (persisting) bookmarks tags. From the post re: the re-launch of del.icio.us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985623
>> "Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916
>> Notes re: how [browser bookmarks with URI|str* tags] could be standardized with JSON-LD: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916#c116 *
***
WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment "Integration with W3C Web Annotations" https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/issues/4
***
W3C Web Share API & W3C Web Target API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449716
Millet, a Language Server for SML
Cool project!
I always thought SML was a great language for teaching computer science and functional programming.
A lot more fun than learning Java. With ML, you got glimpses of aesthetic beauty in code.
The bricklayer IDE and bricklayer-lite are SML IDEs FWIU [1]. Could Millet and/or three Millet VSCode extension and/or the SML/NJ Jupyter kernel [2] be useful for creating executable books [3][4] for learning?
[1] https://bricklayer.org/level-1/ :
> Bricklayer libraries provide support for creating 2D and 3D block-based artifacts. Problem-solving and math are used to exercise creative and artistic skills in a fun and innovative environment. Bricklayer integrates with third-party software including: LEGO Digital Designer, LDraw, Minecraft, and 3D Builder (LeoCAD; `dnf install -y leocad`)
[2] https://github.com/matsubara0507/simple-ismlnj
[3] https://github.com/executablebooks
[4] https://executablebooks.org/en/latest/ (Jupyter-Book: Sphinx (Docutils (.rst ReStructuredText), .md)), MyST-Parser (.md MyST Markdown), Jupyter Kernels (.ipynb Jupyter Notebooks),)
The Cha Cha Slide Is Turing Complete
Turing completeness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
Church-Turing thesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
Is Church-Turing expected to apply to concurrent, quantum computers? To actual quantum physical stimulation, or qubits, or qudits? Presumably there's already a quantum analog
What is quantum field theory and why is it incomplete?
Still the basis of the most precise prediction by a Physics theory:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.2223
I'm always amazed by quantum field theories, with a particular taste for the two dimensional ones (as string theorist :))
Also the basis of the least precise prediction made by a physics theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
> Depending on the Planck energy cutoff and other factors, the discrepancy is as high as 120 orders of magnitude
yes and no. physical theories always have a domain of validity where their prediction make sense and QFT and QM do not give an absolute value of energy (density). sure you can do QFT on curved spacetime (Hawking had some success w/ it) but comparing the QFT vacuum energy with the cosmological constant is sloppy at best.
but yeah, sure, it doesn't work for that :)
The Dymaxion car: Buckminster Fuller’s failed automobile
Car Talk drove a replica.[1] "You’ve pushed shopping carts with broken casters that handle better. ... No one in his or her right mind would ever venture above 45 miles per hour because of the lousy handling."
[1] https://www.cartalk.com/blogs/jamie-lincoln-kitman/test-driv...
Good old Car Talk.
What about with biopolymer superstructure at least, batteries in the surfboard floor, an elegant teardrop airfoil, regenerative braking with natural branching carbon anodes, and an awning?
Those are all solutions to problems the Dymaxion car didn't have?
The main complaints of the Car Talk article are the awful handling resulting from rear wheel steering (giving a bad caster angle resulting in no self-centering-- all modern tricycle motor vehicles put the steer tires at the front, even if it complicates the linkages) and the aerodynamic shape that resulted in a large car with surprisingly little usable interior room. (a classic Buckminster problem, as this is still the big downside of geodesic domes)
All the big compromises of the Dymaxion car came from the shape, which let it hit a drag coefficient of 0.25. But modern car engineering has simply passed it by: a Prius is 0.24 and a Model S is 0.208. There's no reason to accept the downsides of a Dymaxion car today, which is why nobody ever copied the design.
Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII
Similar ones:
"Code girls : the untold story of the American women code breakers of World War II" (2017) https://g.co/kgs/CBSxQv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Girls
"Hidden Figures" (2016) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures https://g.co/kgs/m2fFvN
Women in science : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science
Also, the British Women Royal Naval Service serving in Western Approaches Tactical Unit during WWII, who developed a great number of extremely effective tactics for fighting U-boats, as well as effectively reverse engineering bits and pieces of German technology that had never been physically seen by analyzing the tactics of their employment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Approaches_Tactical_Un...
The associated documentary is "free" to stream on Kanopy. We enjoyed it.
"Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII" (2010) https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/122786 https://g.co/kgs/49A9bD
There are at least hundreds of mostly all masculine dude war movies. As said films are about just regular dudes in war, and historical, is there any appropriate gender outrage?
A person can simply superimpose a whole separate identity and preference agenda to the storyline, which - if non-historical - may be all characters from one writer, whose paintings at least aren't at all obligated to be representative samples.
I recall that most war movies I seen tend to have women in the resistance movements, especially the french one. The only place where there are only men is those that were drafted since the military draft only forced men to go to war.
For shots focusing on the factories, again women tend to be featured. With most young men was drafted into the military front, and much of the civil industry being diverted to produce war material, women was critical to fill in the need for workers. Top Secret Rosies seem to be illustrating that fact.
One major demographic that old war movies tend to not show is children. When half the work group is drafted, and the other half is diverted to do both the civil and the war production (and everything else in private life), children were not just playing in the fairground or studying in school. It is however not very nice to illustrate child labor, so old and new war films tend to avoid that.
Rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_and_reintegrati...
> Children in the military, History of children in the military, Impact of war on children, Paris Principles (Free Children from War Conference), Children in emergencies and conflicts, Children's rights, Stress in early childhood
Disaster Relief procedures for us all: https://www.ready.gov/plan :
> How will I receive emergency alerts and warnings?
> What is my shelter plan?
> What is my evacuation route?
> What is my family/household communication plan?
> Do I need to update my emergency preparedness kit?
The World Excel Championship is being broadcast on ESPN
TIL about Excel e-Sports. From https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/ :
> No finance, just Excel and logical thinking skills. Use IFS, XLOOKUP, SUM, VBA, Power Query: anything is allowed, and the strategy is up to you.
It says VBA, so presumably named variables are allowed in the Excel spreadsheet competition.
What about Python and e.g. Pandas or https://www.pola.rs/ ?
> Some events are invitational, some are open for everyone to participate in.
> All battles are live-streamed and can be spectated on our Youtube channel.
> What about Python and e.g. Pandas or https://www.pola.rs/ ?
I think it is safe to assume that only Microsoft Excel is allowed. The features they listed are all built in features.
Kaggle speed runs as a sport would be interesting.
They really would. I feel like kaggle is mostly teams slowly grinding for very small incremental improvements over each other. Adding a time component would really sort the wheat from the chaff.
It would certainly change the dynamic. Not sure about wheat from the chaff - faster != better.
If you can write it in 20 minutes, I'd be impressed. Excel has everything integrated with macros already so it is easier to use VBA.
There are many ways to do ~no-code GUI analysis with [Jupyter] notebooks (e.g. with the VSCode jupyter notebook support) pretty quickly; with some pointing and clicking of the mouse if you please.
Computational Notebook speedrun competition ideas:
- Arithmetic w/ `assert`: addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, exponents/logarithms; and then again with {NumPy, SymPy, Lean Mathlib}
- Growth curve fitting; data modeling with linear and better models
- "Principia" work-along notebooks
- "Princeton Companion to [Applied] Mathematics" work-along notebooks
- Khan Academy work-along notebooks
> - Arithmetic w/ `assert`: addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, exponents/logarithms; and then again with {NumPy, SymPy, Lean Mathlib}
"How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19452752 ...
"How should logarithms be taught?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28519356
Any good recommendations for starting points to learn how to work with these? I'm not a programmer, but do have programming ability, and use excel all the time. Having a more flexible system with better inputs (tying in web scraping, data pipelines, etc) sounds like a great idea.
Kaggle learn: https://www.kaggle.com/learn
"Python Data Science Handbook" (O'Reilly) http://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook
awesome-python#web-content-extracting: https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python#web-content-extracti...
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
"What is the best way to learn to code from absolute scratch?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299880
I would assume you have to use stock. Excel/Office ships with a VBA IDE that you get to with alt-F11 (and I think by viewing macro source through the menus.)
Alt-F11, thanks. Is there a macro recorder built into Excel that could make learning VBA syntax and UI-API equivalencies easy?
There's a macro recorder, but the code it generates isn't meant to be efficient or readable.
VBA is easy, you can just google it. It's very bad, but once you know it well, and if you stick to a functional style, you can do what you want. For Excel, get to know Range objects well, and to wring some polymorphism out of VBA, learn interfaces.
I've seen basically Mario in VBA in Excel, so I know it's real. "Show formulas" && [VBA, JS] vs an app with test coverage.
Are unit and/or functional automated tests possible with VBA; for software quality and data quality?
GSheets has Apps Script; which is JS, so standard JS patterns work. It looks like Excel online can run but cannot edit VBA macros; and Excel online has a JS API, too.
Quantum in the Chips and Science Act of 2022
> […] Grow a diverse, domestic quantum workforce: The expansion of the Federal Cyber Scholarship-For-Service Program to include artificial intelligence and quantum computing will bolster the Nation’s cyber defense against threats from emerging technologies, while quantum’s addition to the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program will expand the current workforce. The NSF Next Generation Quantum Leaders Pilot Program authorized by this legislation, and which builds upon NSF’s role in the Q-12 Education Partnership, will help the Nation develop a strong, diverse, and future-leaning domestic base of talent steeped in fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, the science that underlines a host of technologies. […]
From #Q12 > QIS K-12 Framework: https://q12education.org/learning-materials/framework :
> When relevant to the STEM subject, employ a learning cycle approach to develop models of quantum systems and phenomena, plan and carry out investigations to test their models, analyze and interpret data, obtain, evaluate and communicate their findings
Where does energy go during destructive interference?
From Wave_interference#Quantum_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_interference#Quantum_inte... :
> Here is a list of some of the differences between classical wave interference and quantum interference:
> - In classical interference, two different waves interfere; In quantum interference, the wavefunction interferes with itself.
> Classical interference is obtained simply by adding the displacements from equilibrium (or amplitudes) of the two waves; In quantum interference, the effect occurs for the probability function associated with the wavefunction and therefore the absolute value of the wavefunction squared.
> The interference involves different types of mathematical functions: A classical wave is a real function representing the displacement from an equilibrium position; a quantum wavefunction is a complex function. A classical wave at any point can be positive or negative; the quantum probability function is non-negative.
> In classical optical interference the energy conservation principle is violated as it requires quanta to cancel. In quantum interference energy conservation is not violated, the quanta merely assume paths per the path integral. All quanta for example terminate in bright areas of the pattern.
From Conservation_of_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy :
> Classically, conservation of energy was distinct from conservation of mass. However, special relativity showed that mass is related to energy and vice versa by E = mc2, and science now takes the view that mass-energy as a whole is conserved. Theoretically, this implies that any object with mass [e.g. photons, and other massful particles] can itself be converted to pure energy, and vice versa. However this is believed to be possible only under the most extreme of physical conditions, such as likely existed in the universe very shortly after the Big Bang or when black holes emit Hawking radiation.
From Conservation_of_energy#Quantum_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy#Quantum... :
> In quantum mechanics, energy of a quantum system is described by a self-adjoint (or Hermitian) operator called the Hamiltonian, which acts on the Hilbert space (or a space of wave functions) of the system. If the Hamiltonian is a time-independent operator, emergence probability of the measurement result does not change in time over the evolution of the system. Thus the expectation value of energy is also time independent. The local energy conservation in quantum field theory is ensured by the quantum Noether's theorem for energy-momentum tensor operator. Due to the lack of the (universal) time operator in quantum theory, the uncertainty relations for time and energy are not fundamental in contrast to the position-momentum uncertainty principle, and merely holds in specific cases (see Uncertainty principle). Energy at each fixed time can in principle be exactly measured without any trade-off in precision forced by the time-energy uncertainty relations. Thus the conservation of energy in time is a well defined concept even in quantum mechanics.
[deleted]
Adding Auditing to Pip
Looks like I'm a little bit late to this article about mailing list discussion about adding ~CVE search to pip.
The broader trend here is to identify the names, versions, and hashes of all software installed packages in all languages and present an SBOM [1][2]. Does/would `pip audit` also lookup CVE vulns for extension modules written in other programming languages like C, Go, and Rust; or do existing tools that also already lookup vulns for Python packages
[1] https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ ; Ctrl-F "SBOM"
[2] "Existing artifact vuln scanners, databases, and specs?" https://github.com/google/osv.dev/issues/55#issue-802542447
FWIW, from the OSV README https://github.com/google/osv.dev:
> This is an ongoing project. We encourage open source ecosystems to adopt the OpenSSF Vulnerability format to enable open source users to easily aggregate and consume vulnerabilities across all ecosystesm. See our blog post for more details.
> The following ecosystems have vulnerabilities encoded in this format:
> GitHub Advisory Database (CC-BY 4.0), PyPI Advisory Database (CC-BY 4.0), Go Vulnerability Database (CC-BY 4.0), Rust Advisory Database (CC0 1.0), Global Security Database (CC0 1.0) OSS-Fuzz (CC-BY 4.0)
> Together, these include vulnerabilities from:
> npm, Maven, Go, NuGet, PyPI, RubyGems, crates.io, Packagist, Linux, OSS-Fuzz
> Does/would `pip audit` also lookup CVE vulns for extension modules written in other programming languages like C, Go, and Rust
For the time being, the plan is to focus `pip-audit` on vulnerabilities in Python packages themselves, not native dependencies of packages that happen to contain binary extensions. The line is, however, blurry: if a Python package is written in C or Rust and has a vulnerability therein, that would be considered a Python ecosystem vulnerability for the purposes of the PYSEC DB. A vulnerability in libssl that happens to be exposed via a Python extension, however, would not be.
So something more comprehensive for the complete SBOM for all languages and extension modules is also advisable for "[Software] Component Inventory and Risk Assessment".
From the article:
> The PyPA maintains an advisory database that stores vulnerabilities affecting PyPI packages in YAML format. For example, pip-audit reported that the version of Babel on my system is vulnerable to PYSEC-2021-421, which is a local code-execution flaw. That PYSEC advisory refers to CVE-2021-42771, which is how the flaw is known to the wider world.
> As it turns out, my system is actually not vulnerable to CVE-2021-42771, as the Ubuntu security entry shows. The pip-audit tool looks at the version numbers of the installed PyPI package to decide which are vulnerable, but Linux distributions regularly backport fixes into earlier versions so the PyPI package version number does not tell the whole story—at least for those who get their PyPI packages from distributions rather than via pip.
pypa/advisory-database: https://github.com/pypa/advisory-database
Tesla’s self-driving technology fails to detect children in the road, tests find
Here is a comparison of this test with an older video:
https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1478802681141645322 (This is January 5th 2022)
Same author, same test, months later:
https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1556991029814886404 (This is August 9th 2022)
The difference? There is absolutely no improvement.
Expecting that the FSD (Fools Self Driving) beta software would get better over time as promised by Elon, this video shows that it doesn't look good at all with this latest failure which drivers on the road, and even pedestrians were no better off and are no safer with these updates.
It is not early days anymore and even with these updates, it is still an unsafe contraption which not only has been falsely and deceptively advertised by Tesla, it is not even near the claims of the robo-taxi level of FSD (Level 4 - 5) with the number of price increases over the years with a product which doesn't work looks more like a scam.
At this point, FSD is essentially Fools Self Driving.
Accident rate per million miles of driving.
Which competing EVs do you like and why?
FSD needs to be substantially better than the average human driver - not on par or worse (which this is).
Nobody is going to tolerate FSD vehicles bugging out and randomly driving into parked cars or pedestrians, killing people in the process.
You can tout millions of miles all day ever day, but it doesn't matter. When these vehicles are put into even semi-tricky situations, they fail far too often. Tesla's software doesn't even require tricky situations... it'll just randomly drive you into a wall or fire truck without warning.
Why? Human drivers do all of those things. Why should I care if I'm killed by a computer or a human? At least if I'm killed by a computer, the data will go into the training set and make future computers safer. But human drivers will learn nothing.
Despite the narrative being spun by FSD companies like Tesla and the rest - human drivers are actually really good at navigating complex, dynamic situations.
These systems however, are not.
I think most folks would rather not be killed because Elon's ego decided a decade ago that Tesla would never consider Lidar sensors, for example, despite the mounting evidence simple cameras are not sufficient.
Recall the Toyota stuck accelerator pedal issue years back? There are people who still refuse to own a Toyota.
What about the Boeing 737-MAX fiasco? An entirely software related bug caused a statistically trivial and insignificant amount of people to lose their lives - yet today there are still people who will never fly on a Boeing aircraft again, despite the issue being resolved.
People will not tolerate loss of life from these systems. They must be substantially better than the average human for the public to be interested.
> human drivers are actually really good at navigating complex situations. These systems however, are not.
This determination needs to be made with data. As far as I can tell there is no conclusive evidence that Teslas on autopilot are involved in more crashes per mile than human drivers, and some evidence that it is safer, though that comes from Tesla, so not giving that much weight. So either it's somewhere close to as safe as human drivers, or data collection in this area is just really bad. I don't know which.
The evidence provided by the likes of Tesla does not compare to real-world driving. They cannot produce that evidence yet, despite however many millions of miles on test circuits and well-known roads they want to tout - it's a false statistic designed to deliberately mislead the public into thinking the software is better than it really is.
The burden of proof is on the FSD companies, not average drivers. The likes of Tesla have to prove their software is far superior to human drivers - and so far they have failed to do so.
There are far too many FSD beta videos out recorded by real users that demonstrate obvious safety issues. The software is just not there yet, and may not be there for a long time, if ever.
Articles like this come out far too often to just be discarded as media "hit" pieces.
>Accident rate per million miles of driving.
Are all driving miles equivalent? Do you think accidents that occur with FSD enabled are the same as where they most often occur under normal human control? What proportion of miles are driven in sunny US states?
> Are all driving miles equivalent?
Which metric is proposed?
Is this an argument supported by data? What about a sound experimental design?
Perhaps we could look to medicine (instead of automotive engineering) for guidance regarding which reductions in stratified accident incidence rate are significant and warrant continued investment in sensor fusion and assistive AI?
Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on tabular data?
AlphaFold's database grows over 200x to cover nearly all known proteins
Much discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262856
The top comment there (from a structural biologist) is worth reading. Here's my opinion, as a computer scientist that worked in this area.
A protein sequence is analogous to a computer program, but the "machine" is a mostly-water solution, and the instructions are interpreted by summing up all the intermolecular forces at play as the sequence is squirted out of a little extruder as a string (as in the stuff your clothes are made of, not text). Bits of the string repel and attract each other and it globs up in some biologically useful structure. The folding problem is the problem of predicting that structure from the string.
Unlike the halting problem, there is no way to generate an execution trace saying a particular glob would be formed in reality. In fact, there is no way to perform a polynomial time check of the result, so we've already escaped the land of P and NP.
Also, things like temperature and proximity to other proteins mean that there might not be a unique fold for a given sequence. Therefore, like the halting problem, we have unknown inputs, and we need to figure out which states an arbitrary program can reach.
When someone claims to have "solved" folding, you should be as skeptical as you would be if someone claimed to have solved the halting problem for arbitrary machine code, and that they don't need any extra information about the machines that run that code. Although their program runs on conventional computers, it also works on programs written for quantum computers.
(Edit: That's not to say this work isn't useful, or that this press release overclaims. I've been hearing some pretty wild claims about this work elsewhere...)
For an unrelated reason, shortly after making that comment, I put 31 genes from a viral genome (the whole genome, assuming we have the reading frames correct and nothing else funky is going on) through AlphaFold. We're getting ready to do some proteomics to see what's in the capsid, and I wanted to inform the proteomics by doing some sequence analysis. Only three genes of the 31 came back with any sort of confidence. Two of the three were crystallized and solved by my group a few years back.
Is the AlphaFold team winning Folding@home? (which started at Washington University in St. Louis, home of the Human Genome Project)
FWIU, Folding@home has additional problems for AlphaFold, if not the AlphaFold team;
> Install our software to become a citizen scientist and contribute your compute power to help fight global health threats like COVID19, Alzheimer’s Disease, and cancer. Our software is completely free, easy to install, and safe to use. Available for: Linux, Windows, Mac
> which started at Washington University in St. Louis, home of the Human Genome Project
While Wash U was a contributor, I am confused about why you call it the home of the Human Genome Project. The Project seems a lot more strongly linked to the Whitehead/MIT in terms of press and the site of key figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project #History
"The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome" https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Sequencing...
If we're just sharing links, I have one too:
Both projects tackle related problems, but each is trying to answer a different question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264059
> Folding@home answers a related but different question. While AlphaFold returns the picture of a folded protein in its most energetically stable conformation, Folding@home returns a video of the protein undergoing folding, traversing its energy landscape.
Is there any NN architectural reason that AlphaFold could not learn and predict the Folding@home protein folding interactions as well? Is there yet an open implementation?
I think it would be much harder to do that, since it probably requires modelling physics at some level, while AlphaFold is really just mining statistical correlations of structures and sequences.
Yes, there are open implementations of nearly-AlphaFold at this point.
FWIU there's no algorithmic reason that AlphaZero-style self play w/ rules could not learn the quantum chemistry / physics. Given the infinite monkey theorem, can an e.g. bayesian NN learn quantum gravity enough to predictively model multibody planetary orbits given an additional solar mass in transit through the solar system? (What about with "try Bernoulli's on GR and call it superfluid quantum gravity" or "the bond yield-curve inversion is a known-good predictor, with lag" as Goal-programming nudges to distributedly-partitioned symbolic EA/GA with a cost/error/survival/fitness function?)
E.g. re-derivations of Lean Mathlib would be the strings to evolve.
Django 4.1
The most anticipated Django release for me personally. Async ORM access is a massive quality of life improvememt, same for async CBV. The later is also a blocker for Django Rest Framework going async.
Sure most CRUD applications work perfectly fine using WSGI, but for anyone using other protocols like WS or MQTT in their app this is kind of a big deal.
## Asynchronous ORM interface
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/releases/4.1/#asynchro... :
`QuerySet` now provides an asynchronous interface for all data access operations. These are named as-per the existing synchronous operations but with an `a` prefix, for example `acreate()`, `aget()`, and so on.
> The new interface allows you to write asynchronous code without needing to wrap ORM operations in `sync_to_async()`:
async for author in Author.objects.filter(name__startswith="A"):
book = await author.books.afirst()
## Asynchronous handlers for class-based views
> View subclasses may now define async HTTP method handlers:
import asyncio
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views import View
class AsyncView(View):
async def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
# Perform view logic using await.
await asyncio.sleep(1)
return HttpResponse("Hello async world!")I don't fully understand the sync_to_async() operation here. So the underlying database is not async, then is Django just tossing the sync DB call onto a thread or something?
Yes, it is just being put on a thread. A future Django release will use async database drivers. Django is very incrementally adding support for async. I don't believe they have started work on async templates yet, which will be one of the last major areas before the framework is fully async.
Yes, they're working from the top of the stack down, so first it was views+middleware, now it's the top layer of the database stack, and in future releases they'll work on pushing native async lower and lower in the stack.
Basically every function call that does db-queries needs an "a"-prefixed version. aget(), acreate(), aget_or_create(), acount(), aexists(), aiterator(), __aiter__, etc. And in future versions they'll work on the lower level, undocumented api, like _afetch_all(), aprefetch_related_objects(), compiler.aexecute_sql(), etc.
Eventually you'll probably need to switch database drivers to something that actually supports async.
Why do they need Async templates? When a template renders it should be pure data and fully on the CPU. It seems Async templates would encourage a bad behavior of doing n+1 queries inside the HTML.
Django makes a lot of use of lazy evaluation. You'll often construct a QuerySet object in a Django view like this:
entries = Entry.objects.filter(
category="python"
).order_by("-created")[:10]
{% for entry in entries %}...
Async template rendering becomes necessary if you want the templates to be able to execute async SQL queries in this way.
Jinja has this feature already with the enable_async=True setting - I wrote a tiny bit about that in https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/related-content
My immediate thought would be custom template tags. Like `{% popular_articles %}` would have to connect to the DB and load the articles. I am sure there are other reasons too.
exactly, it fires database call in a separare thread with coroutine awaiting this threads result.
Ask HN: Is there a tool / product that enables commenting on HTML elements?
I'm searching for a commercial product that enables commenting on HTML elements on a product so it can be shared with an org. Think google comments connected to Inspect Element in chrome that can be shared with an organization.
I want to get away from creating tickets or sending emails highlighting UX concerns. This is cumbersome and not very transparent or collaborative.
Does a tool like this already exist?
Hypothesis/h is a (Pyramid) web app with a JS widget that can be added to the HTML of a page manually or by the Hypothesis browser extension, which enables you to also comment on PDFs, WAVs, GIFs: https://github.com/hypothesis/h
From the W3C Web Annotation spec that Hypothesis implements https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ :
> Selectors: Fragment Selector, CSS Selector, XPath Selector, Text Quote Selector, Text Position Selector, Data Position Selector, SVG Selector, Range Selector, Refinement of Selection
> States: Time State, Request Header State, Refinement of State
Coinbase does not list securities. End of story
Of course Coinbase will say they're not securities.
All crypto should be treated as securities. The rampant insider trading, lack of transparency in project finances and decision making is insane.
I've consulted for a few crypto projects. In most of them, the founders completely misused ICO funds for personal gains and traded their own tokens with inside info.
If your project token is available to be purchased and sold in the US, they should be subject to the same rules other securities follow.
Scamming people shouldn't be this easy.
Just because you can insider trade doesn't make something a security in my view. You can do insider trading around gold or palladium or any other commodity for instance. You can do insider trading with property and land. You can even do insider trading with currencies.
They're not securities because you can insider trade them -- they're securities because they fairly clearly meet the Federal definition;
> The term “security” means any note, stock, treasury stock, security future, security-based swap, bond, debenture, evidence of indebtedness, certificate of interest or participation in any profit-sharing agreement, collateral-trust certificate, preorganization certificate or subscription, transferable share, investment contract, voting-trust certificate, certificate of deposit for a security, fractional undivided interest in oil, gas, or other mineral rights, any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege on any security, certificate of deposit, or group or index of securities (including any interest therein or based on the value thereof), or any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege entered into on a national securities exchange relating to foreign currency, or, in general, any interest or instrument commonly known as a “security”, or any certificate of interest or participation in, temporary or interim certificate for, receipt for, guarantee of, or warrant or right to subscribe to or purchase, any of the foregoing.
Your comment has not contributed anything. Which of those many categories do you think crypto falls within?
For example, foreign currency is not a security, and an intuitive stance would be that crypto is far closer to foreign currency than it is to stocks. Other sources have a more useful definition in my opinion [1]:
> Firstly, a security is simply a financial instrument that represents a specific ownership position in either a corporation, a creditor related to a governmental body, a publicly traded corporation, or rights to ownership as represented by an option. The security must represent some type of financial value. Securities are generally categorised as either debts or equities, with a debt security indicating money that has been borrowed and must be repaid.
Under this definition, it is hard to see how the average "boring" cryptocurrency is a security.
Is "must be an agreement for future performance" a fair first test of whether something is a securities contract?
1) If there is no contractual agreement for future performance, it cannot be a securities contract (a "security").
That we can test before applying 2) the Howey Test, and then 3) assessing whether it's a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid coin/token
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_v._W._J._Howey_Co. :
> "In other words, an investment contract for purposes of the Securities Act means a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party, it being immaterial whether the shares in the enterprise are evidenced by formal certificates or by nominal interests in the physical assets employed in the enterprise."[1]
> "The test is whether the scheme involves an investment of money in a common enterprise with profits to come solely from the efforts of others. If that test be satisfied, it is immaterial whether the enterprise is speculative or non-speculative or whether there is a sale of property with or without intrinsic value."[1]
Collectible coins, trading cards, beanie babies, real estate, and rare earth commodities, for example, are not securities per US securities law. Do these things fail a hypothetical and hopefully helpful "must be an agreement for future performance" litmus test for whether a thing is a security per US case law precedent?
What must be fed into the FTC CAT is a different set of policies.
From "Guidelines for enquiries regarding the regulatory framework for ICOs [pdf]" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16406967 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16407277 :
> This is a helpful table indicating whether a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid coin/token: is a security, qualifies under Swiss AML payment law.
> The "Minimum information requirements for ICO enquiries" appendix seems like a good set of questions for evaluating ICOs. Are there other good questions to ask when considering whether to invest in a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid ICO?
> Are US regulations different from these clear and helpful regulatory guidelines for ICOs in Switzerland?
As well, do investors have any responsibility for evaluating written agreements for future performance before investing?
Does a person have the responsibility of evaluating contracts before entering into them; for example, with the belief that it's a securities agreement for future performance? What burden of responsibility has a securities investor?
Does that business sell any registered securities at all? Why did you think they were selling you a security? Were you presented with a shareholders agreement? A securities agreement? Any sort written contract? Why did you think you were entering into a securities contract if there was no contract?
If someone makes hopeful, pumping, forward-looking statements, does that obligate them to perform?
When does the Statute of Frauds apply to phantom contractual agreements for future performance?
Statute of Frauds: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/statute-of-frauds.asp :
> The statute of frauds (SOF) is a legal concept that requires certain types of contracts to be executed in writing. The statute covers contracts for the sale of land, agreements involving goods worth over $500, and contracts lasting one year or more.
> The statute of frauds was adopted in the U.S. primarily as a common law concept—that is, as unwritten law. However, it has since been formalized by statutes in certain jurisdictions, such as in most states. In a breach of contract case where the statute of frauds applies, the defendant may raise it as a defense.* Indeed, they often must do so affirmatively for the defense to be valid. In such a case, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. The plaintiff must establish that a valid contract was indeed in existence.
Statute of Frauds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_frauds
Q: When should you check for a contractual agreement for future performance, for future returns? A: At least before you give more than $500.
In the US, cryptoasset exchanges have gained specific legal approval from each and every state where those assets are listed for sale.
What process does your state have for approving assets for listing by cryptoasset exchanges? When or why does a state reject a cryptoasset exchange's application to list a cryptoasset?
Is it the case that we have 50 state-level procedures for getting a cryptoasset approved for list by an exchange?
Is it the case that SEC does not provide a "formally reject an unregistered security which is thus not SEC jurisdiction" service?
If some 50 states failed to red flag a cryptoasset, I find it unreasonable to fault cryptoasset exchanges for choosing to list, or retail investors for failing to review a contract for future performance and investing.
I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To
I keep saying this, but:
Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.
When the Internet was 10 years old the year was 1987.
Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.
The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.
# 1970s: The Internet (US Research Institutions, ARPA, IETF, IEEE,)
TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher
# The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C)
HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types.
[No-crypto P2P]
# Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,)
Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate
# ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,)
Linked Data; RDF, RDFa
5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/
- Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW
# Web3 ("Zero-Trust")
SK: Secret Key
PK: Public Key
Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure
ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs.
(A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs)
(DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)
NIST announces preliminary winners of post-quantum competition
After EC DRBG who cares about what NIST does?
Those who have to comply with their standards (e.g. FIPS 140-3), at the very least.
OP does have a point though, especially with DJB's thoughts (and others) on the matter.
https://nitter.net/hashbreaker?lang=en
For FIPS in particular, they've first gotta sunset the traditional algorithms for anyone to strictly need to care (and even then, parallel constructions of PQC+traditional could let other PQC algorithms in -- like the Chrome experiments -- from a FIPS perspective, you can treat the PQC like plaintext). And for them to be useful, adoption needs to occur in the IETF communities (PKIX, TLS, SSH, IKE, ...).
You're probably looking at least 5 years on the adoption window to customers running the lastest updates. NIST's blessing might help some of the IETF conversations that now need to happen. But not listening to DJB, given his track record, likely will anger a subset of IETF contributors and might hinder adoption.
It'll be interesting to see if IETF takes the more conservative approach advocates by DJB or if they continue on with NIST's blessing alone. But I'm just a watcher... :-)
Edit: and for the record, FIPS never mandated Dual EC DRBG but it was still a mistake for NIST to rubber stamp.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31995535 :
> (IDK what the TLS (and FIPS) PQ Algo versioning plans are: 1.4, 2.0?)
Kyber, NTRU, {FIPS-140-3}?
Sorry, reading NIST is worse than reading tea leaves and I don't actively participate in the IETF TLS mailing lists enough to say any more than the next person :-) Just stating that the process (NIST to enterprise customer) takes time for complete PQC adoption across the entire stack.
It shouldn't take long to change software: how long does it take to add a dependency on an open implementation and add an optional config file const pending a standardized list of algos like TLS 1.3+ and FIPS, and fallback to non-PQ; like DNSSEC (edit: and WPA2+WPA3)? Do mining rig companies that specialize in ASICs and FPGAs yet offer competitively-priced TLS load balancers -- now with PQ -- or are they still more expensive than mainboards?
RStudio Is Becoming Posit
At first I thought they were renaming the IDE, which seemed like a clearly bad idea. Makes sense to rename the company I guess.
It tickles my brain every time I see it when I am reminded that the same guy who made ColdFusion and a diet app just decided to build a small company based upon a weird stats language 13 years ago. Good for him.
Those all sound like good names. From the article:
> To avoid this problem and codify our mission into our company charter, we re-incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation in 2019.
> Our charter defines our mission as the creation of free and open source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication. This mission intentionally goes beyond “R for Data Science” — we hope to take the approach that’s succeeded with R and apply it more broadly. We want to build a company that is around in 100 years time that continues to have a positive impact on science and technical communication. We’ve only just started along this road: we’re experimenting with tools for Python and our new Quarto project aims to impact scientific communication far beyond data science.
> [...] What does the new name mean for our commercial software? In many ways, nothing: our commercial products have supported Python for over 2 years. But we will rename them to Posit Connect, Posit Workbench, and Posit Package Manager so it’s easier for folks to understand that we support more than just R. What about our open source software? Similarly, not much is changing: our open source software is and will continue to be predominantly for R. That said, over the past few years we’ve already been investing in other languages like reticulate (calling Python from R), Python features for the IDE, and support for Python and Julia within Quarto. You can expect to see more multilanguage experiments in the future.
Apache Arrow may be the best solution for data interchange in "polyglot notebooks" with multiple programming languages where SIMDJSON-LD isn't fast enough to share references to structs (with data type URIs and quantity and unit URIs) with IPC and ref counting. https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/2815
This feels weird at first glance, but the IDE is staying as RStudio. I love the company and all they’ve done to make data analysis more accessible, so good on them and may they succeed even more in the future.
Still not sure what Quarto is above and beyond a normal RStudio notebook, though.
Quatro is a tool for converting notebooks into shareable formats (like PDF, HTML, Docx). Notebooks are very hard to share. You can't send it to your stakeholders, because Python code will scare them. You can use Quatro to convert notebooks into other formats and easily hide the code. It is like nbconvert on steroids.
I'm working on solution for notebooks sharing with non-technical users. Similar to Quatro it has YAML header, but it can also add widgets to the notebook and serve notebook as interactive web app. My framework is called https://github.com/mljar/mercury
You can use RISE (https://rise.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) for Jupyter notebooks to use it for presentations and also export to PDF.
FWIW repo2docker installs everything listed in /install.R or /.binder/install.R. I'll just cc this here because of the integration potential:
> repo2docker fetches a repository (from GitHub, GitLab, Zenodo, Figshare, Dataverse installations, a Git repository or a local directory) and builds a container image in which the code can be executed. The image build process is based on the [#REES] configuration files found in the repository.
Docs: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
python3 -m pip freeze | tee requirements.txt
conda env export -f environment.yml
conda env export --from-history -f environment.yml
python3 -m pip install jupyter-repo2docker
repo2docker .
# git branch -b mynewbranch; git commit; git push
repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/conda
repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/requirements
repo2docker https://github.com/binder-examples/voila #dashboards #ContainDS
python -m webbrowser https://mybinder.org/
https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...
repo2jupyterlite (WASM) sure would be useful for presentations, too.
Ask HN: Why are there so few artificial sunlight or artificial window products?
The demand for "natural light" in homes and offices is very high, and higher than the availability of actual daylight. And there seems to be a pretty feasible way to create a fake window (a light panel that mimics sunlight through a window), using LEDs and a fresnel lens. There's no shortage of videos around showing how to DIY such a thing, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDeEuzKXCH4
So, why can't I find many such products for sale? There are a couple of high-end companies like https://www.coelux.com/, but where's the mass market stuff? Is there an opportunity being overlooked here, or am I just missing something?
The nuclear reaction at the center of our solar system, our sun, emits EM radiation of various wavelengths. FWIU, there are various devices for phototherapy (light therapy) which are more common in more non-equatorial lattitudes.
Light therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy
There are various "corn bulb" LED products, but FWIU few of the products verifiably produce UVC light; and even fewer still are built from relatively new (full spectrum) UVC LEDs.
The Broan bath fans with SurfaceShield by Vyv bath fans produce ~"ultrablue" but not UVC or a detachable Chromecast Audio.
There are bulbs that switch from normal UVA to ultrablue and/or UVC on the second flIP of the circuit.
UVC causes cancer and cataracts and is blocked by the Earth's atmosphere so almost none reaches the surface. Do NOT shine UVC light on your eyes or skin!
From "Accidental Exposure to Ultraviolet-C (UVC) Germicidal Lights: A Case Report and Recommendations in Orthodontic Clinical Settings" (2021) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03015742211013...
> While UVA radiation is the least hazardous and most associated with skin ageing, UVB is known to cause DNA damage and is a risk factor in developing sunburn, skin cancer, and cataracts. UVC is a “germicidal” radiation with the ability to penetrate deeper, killing bacteria and inactivating viruses.6 There are various types of UVC germicidal lamps—cold cathode germicidal UV lamps, hot cathode germicidal UV lamps, slimline germicidal UV lamps, high output germicidal UV lamps, UV LEDs, and UV lamp shapes with lamp connectors. The latter two are the safest to be used with the utmost precautions.
> This case report describes a vital observation of adverse effects produced by exposure to UV germicidal lamps. There are very few studies reporting accidental exposures to UVC at work in hospital settings. 7 [...]
> Importantly, overexposure to UVC radiation causes ocular and epidermal signs and symptoms. Typical skin reactions in a welder and acute sunburn produced by an electric insect-killing device with an irradiance of as much as 46 mW m-2 have been reported previously in the literature.13, 14 As for germicidal lamps, adverse effects include facial erythema, burning sensation, irritation, pain, keratoconjunctivitis, sunburn, conjunctival redness, blurry vision, photophobia, and irritation to the airway due to the generation of ozone from UVC lamps.
LiteFS a FUSE-based file system for replicating SQLite
LiteFS author here (also Litestream author). I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about how it works or what's on the roadmap.
Given a situation where replication is desirable, is using SQLite + LiteFS a better choice than just replicated Postgres?
Postgres is great and replicating it can work as well. One benefit to SQLite is that it's in-process so you avoid most per-query latency so you don't have to worry as much about N+1 query performance issues. From my benchmarks, I see latency from an application node to a Postgres node as high as 1 millisecond -- even if both are in the same region. SQLite, on the other hand, has per-query latency overhead of about 10-20µs.
Another goal is to simplify deployment. It's a lot easier and cost-effective to just deploy out 10 application nodes across a bunch of regions rather than having to also deploy Postgres replicas in each of those regions too.
SQLite v Postgres here is apples v oranges. Postgres is multi-reader multi-writer whereas SQLite is single-writer multi-reader among other things. They are both very fine databases but solve different use cases.
From https://www.sqlite.org/isolation.html :
> Isolation And Concurrency: SQLite implements isolation and concurrency control (and atomicity) using transient journal files that appear in the same directory as the database file. There are two major "journal modes". The older "rollback mode" corresponds to using the "DELETE", "PERSIST", or "TRUNCATE" options to the journal_mode pragma. In rollback mode, changes are written directly into the database file, while simultaneously a separate rollback journal file is constructed that is able to restore the database to its original state if the transaction rolls back. Rollback mode (specifically DELETE mode, meaning that the rollback journal is deleted from disk at the conclusion of each transaction) is the current default behavior.
> Since version 3.7.0 (2010-07-21), SQLite also supports "WAL mode". In WAL mode, changes are not written to the original database file. Instead, changes go into a separate "write-ahead log" or "WAL" file. Later, after the transaction commits, those changes will be moved from the WAL file back into the original database in an operation called "checkpoint". WAL mode is enabled by running "PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL".
> In rollback mode, SQLite implements isolation by locking the database file and preventing any reads by other database connections while each write transaction is underway. Readers can be active at the beginning of a write, before any content is flushed to disk and while all changes are still held in the writer's private memory space. But before any changes are made to the database file on disk, all readers must be (temporarily) expelled in order to give the writer exclusive access to the database file. Hence, readers are prohibited from seeing incomplete transactions by virtue of being locked out of the database while the transaction is being written to disk. Only after the transaction is completely written and synced to disk and committed are the readers allowed back into the database. Hence readers never get a chance to see partially written changes.
> WAL mode permits simultaneous readers and writers. It can do this because changes do not overwrite the original database file, but rather go into the separate write-ahead log file. That means that readers can continue to read the old, original, unaltered content from the original database file at the same time that the writer is appending to the write-ahead log. In WAL mode, SQLite exhibits "snapshot isolation". When a read transaction starts, that reader continues to see an unchanging "snapshot" of the database file as it existed at the moment in time when the read transaction started. Any write transactions that commit while the read transaction is active are still invisible to the read transaction, because the reader is seeing a snapshot of database file from a prior moment in time.
> An example: Suppose there are two database connections X and Y. X starts a read transaction using BEGIN followed by one or more SELECT statements. Then Y comes along and runs an UPDATE statement to modify the database. X can subsequently do a SELECT against the records that Y modified but X will see the older unmodified entries because Y's changes are all invisible to X while X is holding a read transaction. If X wants to see the changes that Y made, then X must end its read transaction and start a new one (by running COMMIT followed by another BEGIN.)
Or:
ROLLBACK; // cancel the tx e.g. because a different dbconn thread detected updated data before the tx was to be COMMITted.
// Replay the tx
BEGIN;
// replay the same SQL statements
COMMIT;This is saying that SQLite allows reads and writes to happen simultaneously, but it's still single-writer. There's a WIP branch to add concurrent writes.
> Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
https://www.sqlite.org/cgi/src/doc/begin-concurrent/doc/begi...
Shit. I was wrong. Thank you for sharing.
Heaviest neutron star on record is 2.35 times the Solar mass
What percentage of black holes are formed by neutron star events? What percentage of black holes are formed by gamma ray fluid field interactions?
"What If (Tiny) Black Holes Are Everywhere?" (@PBSSpaceTime) https://youtu.be/srVKjWn26AQ :
> ~ every 30 km
How does the gravitational spacetime fluid field disturbance of our comparatively baby non-neutron-star Sun compare in diameter and non-viscosity?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun :
> The Sun's diameter is about 1.39 million kilometers (864,000 miles), or 109 times that of Earth. Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, comprising about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. [20] Roughly three-quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron. [21]
> The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V). As such, it is informally, and not completely accurately, referred to as a yellow dwarf (its light is actually white). It formed approximately 4.6 billion [a] [14][22] years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that became the Solar System. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.
> Every second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, and in the process converts 4 million tons of matter into energy. This energy, which can take between 10,000 and 170,000 years to escape the core, is the source of the Sun's light and heat. When hydrogen fusion in its core has diminished to the point at which the Sun is no longer in hydrostatic equilibrium, its core will undergo a marked increase in density and temperature while its outer layers expand, eventually transforming the Sun into a red giant. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of Mercury and Venus, and render Earth uninhabitable – but not for about five billion years.
G2V "G Star": Hydrogen + Fusion => Helium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-type_main-sequence_star :
> A G-type main-sequence star (Spectral type: G-V), also often called a yellow dwarf, or G star, is a main-sequence star (luminosity class V) of spectral type G. Such a star has about 0.9 to 1.1 solar masses and an effective temperature between about 5,300 and 6,000 K. Like other main-sequence stars, a G-type main-sequence star is converting the element hydrogen to helium in its core by means of nuclear fusion, but however can also fuse helium when hydrogen runs out. The Sun, the star to which the Earth is gravitationally bound in the center of the Solar System, is an example of a G-type main-sequence star (G2V type). Each second, the Sun fuses approximately 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium in a process known as the proton–proton chain (4 hydrogens form 1 helium), converting about 4 million tons of matter to energy. [1][2] Besides the Sun, other well-known examples of G-type main-sequence stars include Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Capella and 51 Pegasi. [3][4][5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star :
> A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star, which had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses, possibly more if the star was especially metal-rich. [1] Except for black holes and some hypothetical objects (e.g. white holes, quark stars, and strange stars), neutron stars are the smallest and densest currently known class of stellar objects. [2] Neutron stars have a radius on the order of 10 kilometres (6 mi) and a mass of about 1.4 solar masses. [3] They result from the supernova explosion of a massive star, combined with gravitational collapse, that compresses the core past white dwarf star density to that of atomic nuclei.
Show HN: Pg_jsonschema – A Postgres extension for JSON validation
pg_jsonschema is a solution we're exploring to allow enforcing more structure on json and jsonb typed postgres columns.
We initially wrote the extension as an excuse to play with pgx, the rust framework for writing postgres extensions. That let us lean on existing rust libs for validation (jsonschema), so the extension's implementation is only 10 lines of code :)
https://github.com/supabase/pg_jsonschema/blob/fb7ab09bf6050...
happy to answer any questions!
Nice work, however, I am structurally dubious of putting too much functionality onto a classical centralized RDBMS since it can't be scaled out if performance becomes a problem. It's CPU load and it's tying up a connection which is a large memory load (as implemented in postgres, connections are "expensive") and since this occurs inside a transaction it's holding locks/etc as well. I know it's all compiled native code so it's about as fast as it can be, but, it's just a question of whether it's the right place to do that as a general concern.
I'd strongly prefer to have the application layer do generic json-schema validation since you can spawn arbitrary containers to spread the load. Obviously some things are unavoidable if you want to maintain foreign-key constraints or db-level check constraints/etc but people frown on check constraints sometimes as well. Semantic validity should be checked before it gets to the DB.
I was exploring a project with JSON generation views inside the database for coupling the DB directly to SOLR for direct data import, and while it worked fine (and performed fine with toy problems) that was just always my concern... even there where it's not holding write locks/etc, how much harder are you hitting the DB for stuff that, ultimately, can. be done slower but more scalably in an application container?
YAGNI, I know, cross the bridge when it comes, butjust as a blanket architectural concern that's not really where it belongs imo.
In my case at least, probably it's something that could be pushed off to followers in a leader-follower cluster as a kind of read replica, but I dunno if that's how it's implemented or not. "Read replicas" are something that are a lot more fleshed out in Citus, Enterprise, and the other commercial offerings built on raw Postgres iirc.
All this does is make writing a CHECK constraint for a JSON blob relatively straightforward. And yes you should use CHECKs in the database. In practice, it is very easy for application code to either not check or screw it up. It is much harder to find and clean up bad data in the database than prevent it from being inserted. By making it a schema config, it is much easier to audit by other engineers and more likely to be correct.
If CHECKs are causing perf issues, then okay maybe put the problematic ones somewhere else.
You could cost the stored procedures' deployment costs in cryptographically-signed-redundant-data-storage bytes and penalize unnecessary complexity by Costing Opcodes (in the postgres database ~"virtual machine runtime", which supports many non-halting programming languages; such as rust, which is great to see.) and paying for redundant (smart contract output) consensus where it's worth it.
TIL about https://github.com/mulesoft-labs/json-ld-schema: "JSON Schema/SHACL based validation of JSON-LD documents". Perhaps we could see if that's something that should be done in pgx or in the application versions deployed alongside the database versions?
Computer science proof unveils unexpected form of entanglement
I always said that computer science was going to be the method to complete physics, whether it be finishing the Standard Model or proving finally Dark Matter is fiction, which is why we can't detect it. Maybe it's still not entirely clear, but just trust me.
Good lord no, just no. Computer Science is not going to be the method to "complete physics." "Complete physics" isn't even a sensible phrase. Source: me, (former) physicist.
Evolutionary algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
Related techniques > Particle swarm optimization:
> Particle swarm optimization is based on the ideas of animal flocking behaviour.[7] Also primarily suited for numerical optimization problems
Symbolic EA will surpass all of human physics in the next 10 years.
To complete physics, which spacetime predictions can or must have zero error?
The notion that physics can ever be complete is...not even wrong.
Prove it.
Bazinga.
Perhaps the oracle could indicate when the Career().solve_physics() routine will halt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Securing name resolution in the IoT: DNS over CoAP
The "Matter" (fka "Project Chip") IoT protocol (which succeeds OpenThread FWIU) Wikipedia SeeAlso links to CoAP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
What are the functional differences and opportunities in regards to name resolution?
Matter: https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip
Are any of the "Certificate Transparency on a blockchain / dlt / immutable permissioned distributed ledger" approaches applicable to this problem domain? Solve DNS again for IoT?
Technically Matter can run purely local, no external web requests (well there are some attestation and certs that are confirmed by the Controller). Then Matter devices use Endpoints and Clusters for control, device to device or Controller to device. Matter devices' Commissioning process is done in 2 ways - for Thread devices, they require the operational dataset of the Thread network, which is held by the Border Router, then the Border Router needs information about the Thread Device (Device ID, Discriminator, and PIN Code). This can be exchanged over BLE or NFC with the Controller (smartphone app like Homekit, Google Home, etc). If you have WiFi only devices then Commissioning is done via the Controller only. In both of these cases any DNS lookup would be done by the Controller.
> Technically Matter can run purely local, no external web requests (well there are some attestation and certs that are confirmed by the Controller).
So Matter should work when the [W]LAN is up but there is no external DNS or IP connectivity?
> Then Matter devices use Endpoints and Clusters for control, device to device or Controller to device. Matter devices' Commissioning process is done in 2 ways - for Thread devices, they require the operational dataset of the Thread network, which is held by the Border Router, then the Border Router needs information about the Thread Device (Device ID, Discriminator, and PIN Code). This can be exchanged over BLE or NFC with the Controller (smartphone app like Homekit, Google Home, etc). If you have WiFi only devices then Commissioning is done via the Controller only. In both of these cases any DNS lookup would be done by the Controller.
Does the Controller optionally run DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS), DoT (DNS-over-TLS), DoQ (DNS-over-QUIC; which is easy to load-balance because it's UDP), DNS-over-CoAP, or plain-old unsecured DNS with optional DNSSEC validation? What about ENS (Ethereum Name Service; "web3 dns"; why was DNS reinvented for the smart-contract world? And what about Matter and IoT?
Found this which explains ENS, which is perhaps less obtusely more complex than your DNS-over-CoAP thing: https://www.cryptohopper.com/blog/6536-what-is-the-web3-doma... ( https://web3py.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ens_overview.html )
> ENS domains work similar to traditional domain names, but with the new web 3.0 infrastructure, they can create decentralized applications and websites, and store data or files on the blockchain.
> The ENS is the new domain naming system built on top of the Ethereum network that enables users to create memorable and distinctive addresses or usernames. It utilizes Ethereum's smart contracts to provide supplementary services to the conventional DNS and manage domain name registration and resolution. ENS allows users to create a single username for all their wallet addresses, decentralized apps, and websites in a distributed ecosystem.
> ENS utilizes three types of smart contracts: the registry, the registrars, and the resolvers.
And of course there are better than PIN codes and CRL-less x.509 certs for entropy there. DLTs are specifically designed to be resilient to [mDNS] DDoS.
Maybe powers of π don't have unexpectedly good approximations?
I wonder what happens for powers of e. This should be different than pi, since e has continued fraction coefficients that make a nice pattern [2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 4, 1, 1, ...]. e^2 does as well (https://oeis.org/A001204). (I know this fact but have never understood any of the proofs.)
But e^3 (https://oeis.org/A058282) does not have a "nice pattern", and neither does e^4 (https://oeis.org/A058283)
/? 3blue1brown e^ipi https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=3blue1bro...
Given:
e = limit((1 + 1/n)^n, +∞) # Euler's number
i = √-1 # orthogonal; i_0^2 = -1
pi = (666/212 - 22/7)*π # circle circumference / diameter
e^iπ + 1 = 0
e^ix = cos(x) + i*sin(x)
e (Euler's number) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)
Is there something fundamental here - with e.g. radix base e - about countability and a continuum of reals, and maybe constructive interference?
When EM waves that are in phase combine, the resultant amplitude of the combined waveform is the sum of the amplitudes; constructive interference is addition. And from addition, subtraction & multiplication and exponents and logarithms.
And then this concept of phase and curl ( convergence and divergence ) in non-orthogonal, probably not conditionally-independent fluid fields that combine complexly and nonlinearly. Define distance between (fluid) field moments. A coherent multibody problem hopefully with unitarity and probably nonlocality.
Can emergence of complex adaptive behavior in complex nonlinear systems of fields emerge from such observable phenomena as countability (perhaps just of application-domain-convenient field-combinatorial multiples in space Z)?
Freezing Requirements with Pip-Tools
Did you ever try poetry[1]?
It is a great tool that I use in all my projects. It effectively solves dependency management for me in a very easy to use way.
Dependency management using requirements.txt used to give me such a headache, now I just have a pyproject.toml that I know works.
[tool.poetry.dependencies]
python = ">=3.8,<3.9"
pandas = "^1.4.3"
What I like about poetry is that it makes sure that the whole dependency graph of the packages that you add is correct. If it can not solve the graph, then it fails fast and it fails hard, which is a good thing.
This is probably a very bad explainer of what poetry does, but be sure to check it out! :)
Isn't that the same as adding version constraints to setuptools' setup.cfg? [1] pip will use these in its dependency resolver.
You can also constrain the Python version in there if you want.
[1] https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/quickstart.ht...
Maybe it is the same, but the idea is to take that selected version of the dependency and store a hash checksum for it, so that one can later get the exact same dependencies. Poetry only does not source setup.cfg, but its tool-specific config file. This way it stays out of the way of any other tool.
pip-tools can hash as well: https://pip-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#using-hashes
Using a tool specific config file seems like a design choice with upsides and downsides, which I respect
A Pipfile can store hashes for multiple versions of a package built for multiple architectures; whereas requirements.txt can only store the hash of one version of the package on one platform.
Can a requirements.txt or a Pipfile store cryptographically-signed hashes for each dependency? Which tool would check that not PyPI-upload but package-builder-signing keys validate?
FWIU, nobody ever added GPG .asc signature support to Pip? What keys would it trust for which package? Should twine download after upload and check the publisher and PyPI-upload signatures?
Are cryptographically-signed hashes really necessary in this case (why?)? What would be the secret, which is used for signing?
If the hashes are retrieved over the same channel as the package (i.e. HTTPS), and that channel is unfortunately compromised, why wouldn't a MITM tool change those software package artifact hash checksums too?
Only if the key used to sign the package / package manifest with per-file hashes is or was retrieved over a different channel (i.e. WKD, HKP (HTTPS w/w/o Certificate Pinning (*))), and the key is trusted to sign for that package, then install the software package artifact and assign file permissions and extended filesystem attributes.
From the sigstore docs: https://docs.sigstore.dev/ :
> sigstore empowers software developers to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images, binaries, bill of material manifests [SBOM] and more. Signing materials are then stored in a tamper-resistant public log.
/? sigstore sbom: https://www.google.com/search?q=sigstore+sbom
> It’s free to use for all developers and software providers, with sigstore’s code and operational tooling being 100% open source, and everything maintained and developed by the sigstore community.
> How sigstore works: Using Fulcio, sigstore requests a certificate from our root Certificate Authority (CA). This checks you are who you say you are using OpenID Connect, which looks at your email address to prove you’re the author. Fulcio grants a time-stamped certificate, a way to say you’re signed in and that it’s you.
https://github.com/sigstore/fulcio
> You don’t have to do anything with keys yourself, and sigstore never obtains your private key. The public key that Cosign creates gets bound to your certificate, and the signing details get stored in sigstore’s trust root, the deeper layer of keys and trustees and what we use to check authenticity.
https://github.com/sigstore/cosign
> our certificate then comes back to sigstore, where sigstore exchanges keys, asserts your identity and signs everything off. The signature contains the hash itself, public key, signature content and the time stamp. This all gets uploaded to a Rekor transparency log, so anyone can check that what you’ve put out there went through all the checks needed to be authentic.
Qubit: Quantum register: Qudits and qutrits
To just quote from Wikipedia:
"Qubit > Quantum register > Qudits and qutrits" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Qudits_and_qubits
> ## Qudits and qutrits
> The term qudit denotes the unit of quantum information that can be realized in suitable d-level quantum systems.[8] A qubit register that can be measured to N states is identical[c] to an N-level qudit. A rarely used[9] synonym for qudit is quNit, [10] since both `d` and N are frequently used to denote the dimension of a quantum system.
> Qudits are similar to the integer types in classical computing, and may be mapped to (or realized by) arrays of qubits. Qudits where the d-level system is not an exponent of 2 can not be mapped to arrays of qubits. It is for example possible to have 5-level qudits.
> In 2017, scientists at the National Institute of Scientific Research constructed a pair of qudits with 10 different states each, giving more computational power than 6 qubits.[11]
> Similar to the qubit, the qutrit is the unit of quantum information that can be realized in suitable 3-level quantum systems. This is analogous to the unit of classical information trit of ternary computers.
> ## Physical implementations [of qubits,]
> Any two-level quantum-mechanical system can be used as a qubit. Multilevel systems can be used as well, if they possess two states that can be effectively decoupled from the rest (e.g., ground state and first excited state of a nonlinear oscillator). There are various proposals. Several physical implementations that approximate two-level systems to various degrees were successfully realized. Similarly to a classical bit where the state of a transistor in a processor, the magnetization of a surface in a hard disk and the presence of current in a cable can all be used to represent bits in the same computer, an eventual quantum computer is likely to use various combinations of qubits in its design.
> The following is an incomplete list of physical implementations of qubits, and the choices of basis are by convention only: [...]
See also: "Quantum logic gate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate
>> Quantum Monte Carlo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Monte_Carlo :
>> Quantum Monte Carlo encompasses a large family of computational methods whose common aim is the study of complex quantum systems. One of the major goals of these approaches is to provide a reliable solution (or an accurate approximation) of the quantum many-body problem. [...] The difficulty is however that solving the Schrödinger equation requires the knowledge of the many-body wave function in the many-body Hilbert space, which typically has an exponentially large size in the number of particles. Its solution for a reasonably large number of particles is therefore typically impossible,*
> What sorts of independent states can or should we map onto error-corrected qubits in an approximating system?
> Propagation of Uncertainty ... Numerical stability ... Chaotic convergence, ultimately, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty
> Programming the Universe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Universe :
> Lloyd also postulates that the Universe can be fully simulated using a quantum computer; however, in the absence of a theory of quantum gravity, such a simulation is not yet possible. "Particles not only collide, they compute."
> Quantum on Silicon looks cheaper in today dollars.
Morello's,
> Devide [sic] the universe in QFT field-equal halves A and B, take energy from A to make B look like A, then add qubit error correction, and tell me if there's enough energy to simulate the actual universe on a universe QC with no instruction pipeline.
Due to error correction; propagation of uncertainty.
"Quantum computing in silicon hits 99% accuracy" (2022) https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/940321 :
> Quantum computing in silicon hits the 99% threshold
> Morello et al achieved 1-qubit operation fidelities up to 99.95 per cent, and 2-qubit fidelity of 99.37 per cent with a three-qubit system comprising an electron and two phosphorous atoms, introduced in silicon via ion implantation.
> A Delft team in the Netherlands led by Lieven Vandersypen achieved 99.87 per cent 1-qubit and 99.65 per cent 2-qubit fidelities using electron spins in quantum dots formed in a stack of silicon and silicon-germanium alloy (Si/SiGe).
> A RIKEN team in Japan led by Seigo Tarucha similarly achieved 99.84 per cent 1-qubit and 99.51 per cent 2-qubit fidelities in a two-electron system using Si/SiGe quantum dots.
>> The following is an incomplete list of physical implementations of qubits, and the choices of basis are by convention only: [...]
Qubit#Physical_implementations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Physical_implementations
- note the "electrons" row of the table
> See also: "Quantum logic gate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate
To improve search results on YouTube, use the search prefix “intitle:”
YouTube's search is horrible. No, I don't want "related results" that are completely unrelated to my query, neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
- [ ] ENH: yt mobile app: Share search query urls
- [ ] ENH,SCH: https://schema.org/MediaObject and search cards
- [ ] UBY: search: transcript search snippets
OpenSSL Security Advisory
Here's a good summary of the flaw:
https://guidovranken.com/2022/06/27/notes-on-openssl-remote-...
Note that the bug is only in 3.0.4, which was released June 21, 2022. So if you didn't update to this version, it's unlikely you're vulnerable.
You're talking about the first CVE. The second one affects 1.1 too.
Thankfully I can't imagine anyone using AES-OCB.
As a non-crypto-nerd: How viable is it to make a “safe” OpenSSL, which just doesn’t support all the cipher modes (?) that the HN crowd would mock me for accidentally using?
OpenSSL > Forks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL#Forks
TLS 1.3 specifies which curves and ciphers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#TLS_1...
(IDK what the TLS (and FIPS) PQ Algo versioning plans are: 1.4, 2.0?)
Mozilla [Open]SSL Config generator: https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/
Axial Higgs mode spotted in materials at room temperature (2022)
From the article "Axial Higgs mode spotted in materials at room temperature" https://physicsworld.com/a/axial-higgs-mode-spotted-in-mater... :
> The two pathways of interest to the team were the excitation of a Higgs mode with no intrinsic angular momentum and the excitation of an axial Higgs mode. By varying the polarization of the incoming laser light and the polarization of the detected light, the team was able to observe this interference and confirm the existence of the axial Higgs mode in the material. What is more, the observations were made a room temperature, whereas most other quantum phenomena can only be seen at very low temperatures.
> The team now hopes that their relatively simple experimental approach could be used to identify axial Higgs modes in other materials including superconductors, magnets, and ferroelectrics. This could prove useful for future technologies because materials containing axial Higgs modes could be used as quantum sensors. And because the mathematics of the axial Higgs mode is analogous to that used in particle physics, studying the quasiparticles could provide clues for what lies beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
- [x] Room temperature quantum experiment
- [x] Superfluidity (see also Superfluid Quantum Gravity)
- [x] Angular momentum
"https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/new-particle-higgs-axial-... :
> “The detection of the axial Higgs was predicted in high-energy particle physics to explain dark matter. However, it has never been observed. Its appearance in a condensed matter system was completely surprising and heralds the discovery of a new broken symmetry state that had not been predicted.
> “Unlike the extreme conditions typically required to observe new particles, this was done at room temperature in a tabletop experiment where we achieve quantum control of the mode by just changing the polarisation of light.”
> Burch believes the simple setup provides opportunities for using similar experiments in other areas. “Many of these experiments were performed by an undergraduate in my lab,” he says. “The approach can be straightforwardly applied to the quantum properties of numerous collective phenomena, including modes in superconductors, magnets, ferroelectrics and charge density waves. Furthermore, we bring the study of quantum interference in materials with correlated and/or topological phases to room temperature, overcoming the difficulty of extreme experimental conditions.”
"Axial Higgs mode detected by quantum pathway interference in RTe3" (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04746-6
> [...] Here we discover an axial Higgs mode in the CDW system RTe3 using the interference of quantum pathways. In RTe3 (R = La, Gd), the electronic ordering couples bands of equal or different angular momenta4,5,6. As such, the Raman scattering tensor associated with the Higgs mode contains both symmetric and antisymmetric components, which are excited via two distinct but degenerate pathways. This leads to constructive or destructive interference of these pathways, depending on the choice of the incident and Raman-scattered light polarization.
New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'
Creativity #Neuroscience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity#Neuroscience
awesome-ideation-tools in re: neuroimaging https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools
/? creativity forgetting rate and instability in the brain: https://www.google.com/search?q=creativity+forgetting+rate+a...
Catastrophic interference is proposed as one cause of maybe pathological forgetting in the brain. This forgetting in the brain may be strongly linked with creativity. Are there links to hippocampal neurogenesis?
Catastrophic interference > Proposed solutions > Orthogonality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference :
> Input vectors are said to be orthogonal to each other if the pairwise product of their elements across the two vectors sum to zero. For example, the patterns [0,0,1,0] and [0,1,0,0] are said to be orthogonal because (0×0 + 0×1 + 1×0 + 0×0) = 0. One of the techniques which can create orthogonal representations at the hidden layers involves bipolar feature coding (i.e., coding using -1 and 1 rather than 0 and 1). [10] Orthogonal patterns tend to produce less interference with each other. However, not all learning problems can be represented using these types of vectors and some studies report that the degree of interference is still problematic with orthogonal vectors. [2]
Visualizing quantum mechanics in an interactive simulation
See a full description of the simulation software at:
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/optical-engineer...
Practical and neat. It says TypeScript and "optical table"? Where are the sources? https://lab.quantumflytrap.com/lab
"Visualizing quantum mechanics in an interactive simulation – Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap" Optical Engineering (2022) https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/optical-engineer... :
> Abstract: Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap is a no-code online laboratory of an optical table, presenting quantum phenomena interactively and intuitively. It supports a real-time simulation of up to three entangled photons. Users can place typical optical elements (such as beam splitters, polarizers, Faraday rotators, and detectors) with a drag-and-drop graphical interface. Virtual Lab operates in two modes. The sandbox mode allows users to compose arbitrary setups. Quantum Game serves as an introduction to Virtual Lab features, approachable for users with no prior exposure to quantum mechanics. We introduce visual representation of entangled states and entanglement measures. It includes interactive visualizations of the ket notation and a heatmap-like visualization of quantum operators. These quantum visualizations can be applied to any discrete quantum system, including quantum circuits with qubits and spin chains. These tools are available as open-source TypeScript packages – Quantum Tensors and BraKetVue. Virtual Lab makes it possible to explore the nature of quantum physics (state evolution, entanglement, and measurement), to simulate quantum computing (e.g., the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm), to use quantum cryptography (e.g., the Ekert protocol), to explore counterintuitive quantum phenomena (e.g., quantum teleportation and the Bell inequality violation), and to recreate historical experiments (e.g., the Michelson–Morley interferometer).
Quantum-Flytrap/quantum-tensors https://github.com/Quantum-Flytrap/quantum-tensors :
> A TypeScript package for sparse tensor operations on complex numbers in your browser - for quantum computing, quantum information, and interactive visualizations of quantum physics.
Quantum-Flytrap/bra-ket-vue https://github.com/Quantum-Flytrap/bra-ket-vue :
> An interactive visualizer for quantum states and matrices.
#Q12 /? q12 quantum: https://www.google.com/search?q=q12+quantum
This is pretty cool - quantum behavior is really not intuitive and being able to play with it helps clarify it
I do wish each level had more explanation about the concept it's teaching. You can figure things out if you know a small amount about how quantum mechanics work (like knowing once you measure something the superposition collapses) but the game would be a better teaching tool if there were explanations before/after you complete a level
For people interested in QM but without a physics/math background Carlo Rovelli has a book called Helgoland that explains a lot of the basics in a non-technical way
> if you know a small amount about how quantum mechanics work (like knowing once you measure something the superposition collapses)
FWIU it's possible to infer from nearby particles without incurring Heisenberg (and/or Bell's?) with Quantum Tagging?
"Helgoland" (2020) https://g.co/kgs/wZXRKQ
The other day I found a quantum circuit puzzle game called "QuantumQ" that has you add a Hadamard gate - statistical superposition - without requiring really any QM at all; which may imply that applied EA could solve the defined problems.
ray-pH/quantumQ: https://github.com/ray-pH/quantumQ
Quantum logic gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate #Hadamard_gate
Show HN: CSVFiddle – Query CSV files with DuckDB in the browser
By no means am I crapping on what you've created — it looks great, and I've always wanted to try DuckDB and now you've made a frictionless entrypoint — just wanted to point out in general that querying CSV with SQL is more accessible than some people might have assumed. e.g. here's a recent TIL blogpost from Simon Willison about him discovering how to do sqlite queries against CSV from the command line: https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-line-csv-operations
One suggestion I would make: the Uber trips data is interesting, but might be too big for this demo? I was getting a few loading errors when trying it (didn't investigate where in the process the bottleneck was though)
On HN: "One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31824030
A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssembly
Wizard: An advanced WebAssembly Engine for Research - https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine
- [ ] SIMD? https://github.com/titzer/wizard-engine/search?q=simd
Wizard supports parsing and typechecking of SIMD instructions (passing all the spec tests for them) but no interpreter implementation yet, so it can't execute them. Help wanted :)
One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite
SQLite's virtual table API (https://www.sqlite.org/vtab.html) makes it possible to access other data structures through the query engine. You don't need to know much if anything about how the database engine executes queries, you only need to implement the callbacks it needs to do its job. A few years ago I wrote an extension to let me search through serialized Protobufs which were stored as blobs in a regular database.
And in fact there is a CSV virtual table available from SQLite but it's not built in the normal client: https://www.sqlite.org/csv.html
It really should be, as the code is tiny and this functionality is not overly exotic.
In my experience [1], the CSV virtual table was really slow. Doing some analysis on a 1,291 MB file, a query took 24.7 seconds using the virtual table vs 3.4 seconds if you imported the file first.
The CSV virtual table source code is a good pedagogical tool for teaching how to build a virtual table, though.
[1]: https://cldellow.com/2018/06/22/sqlite-parquet-vtable.html
https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv/blob/main/app/external/sqli... modifies the sqlite3 virtual table engine to use the faster zsv parser. have not quantified the difference, but in all tests I have run, `zsv sql` runs faster (sometimes much faster) than other sqlite3-on-CSV solutions mentioned in this entire discussion (unless you include those that cache their indexes and then measure against a post-cached query). Disclaimer: I'm the main zsv author
What are the differences between the zsv and csv parsers?
Is csvw with linked data URIs also doable?
Not sure what you mean by csvw. But, zsvlib is a CSV parser, and zsv is a CLI that uses zsvlib. zsv also uses the sqlite3 vtable based on the example in the original sqlite3 code, but it modifies it to use the zsvlib parser instead of the original CSV parser. The zsv parser is different from most CSV parsers in how it uses SIMD operations and minimizes memory copying. zsvlib parses CSV based on the same spec that Excel implements, so having data URIs in the CSV is fine, but if you wanted a compound value (e.g. text + link), you would need to overlay your own structure into the CSV text data (for example, embed JSON inside a column of CSV data). Not sure that answers your question but if not, feel free to add further detail and I'll try again...
## /? sqlite arrow
- "Comparing SQLite, DuckDB and Arrow with UN trade data" (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29010103 ; partial benchmarks of query time and RAM requirements [relative to data size] would be
- "Introducing Apache Arrow Flight SQL: Accelerating Database Access" (2022) https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2022/02/16/introducing-arrow-f... :
> Motivation: While standards like JDBC and ODBC have served users well for decades, they fall short for databases and clients which wish to use Apache Arrow or columnar data in general. Row-based APIs like JDBC or PEP 249 require transposing data in this case, and for a database which is itself columnar, this means that data has to be transposed twice—once to present it in rows for the API, and once to get it back into columns for the consumer. Meanwhile, while APIs like ODBC do provide bulk access to result buffers, this data must still be copied into Arrow arrays for use with the broader Arrow ecosystem, as implemented by projects like Turbodbc. Flight SQL aims to get rid of these intermediate steps.
## "The Virtual Table Mechanism Of SQLite" https://sqlite.org/vtab.html :
> - One cannot create a trigger on a virtual table.
Just posted about eBPF a few days ago; opcodes have costs that are or are not costed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688180
> - One cannot create additional indices on a virtual table. (Virtual tables can have indices but that must be built into the virtual table implementation. Indices cannot be added separately using CREATE INDEX statements.)
It looks like e.g. sqlite-parquet-vtable implements shadow tables to memoize row group filters. How does JOIN performance vary amongst sqlite virtual table implementations?
> - One cannot run ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN commands against a virtual table.
Are there URIs in the schema? Mustn't there thus be a meta-schema that does e.g. nested structs with portable types [with URIs], (and jsonschema, [and W3C SHACL])? #nbmeta #linkedresearch
## /? sqlite arrow virtual table
- sqlite-parquet-vtable reads parquet with arrow for SQLite virtual tables https://github.com/cldellow/sqlite-parquet-vtable :
$ sqlite/sqlite3
sqlite> .eqp on
sqlite> .load build/linux/libparquet
sqlite> CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE demo USING parquet('parquet-generator/99-rows-1.parquet');
sqlite> SELECT * FROM demo;
//
sqlite> SELECT * FROM demo WHERE foo = 123;
sqlite> SELECT * FROM demo WHERE foo = '123'; // incurs a severe query plan performance regression without immediate feedback
`EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN` https://www.sqlite.org/eqp.html :
> The EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN SQL command is used to obtain a high-level description of the strategy or plan that SQLite uses to implement a specific SQL query. Most significantly, EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN reports on the way in which the query uses database indices. This document is a guide to understanding and interpreting the EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN output. [...] Table and Index Scans [...] Temporary Sorting B-Trees (when there's not an `INDEX` for those columns) ... `.eqp on`
The SQLite "Query Planner" docs https://www.sqlite.org/queryplanner.html list Big-O computational complexity bound estimates for queries with and without prexisting indices.
## database / csv benchmarks
Show HN: Easily Convert WARC (Web Archive) into Parquet, Then Query with DuckDB
How does this compare with SQLite approaches shared recently?
Well there's a virtual table extension to read parquet files in SQLite. I've not tried it myself. https://github.com/cldellow/sqlite-parquet-vtable
Could this work with datasette (which is a flexible interface to sqlite with a web-based query editor)?
It appears so: https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/657
Bundling binary tools in Python wheels
The Python wheel "ecosystem" is rather nice these days. You can create platform wheels and bundle in shared objects and binaries compiled for those platforms, automated by tools like auditwheel (Linux) and delocate-wheel (OSX). These tools even rewrite the wheel's manifest and update the shared object RPATH values and mangle the names to ensure they don't get clobbered by stuff in the system library path. The auditwheel tool converts a "linux" wheel into a "manylinux" wheel which is guaranteed by the spec to run on certain minimum Linux kernels.
Wheels are merely zips with a different extension, so worst case for projects where these automation tools fail you you can do it yourself. You simply need to be careful to update the manifest and make sure shared objects are loaded in the correct order.
On the user side, a `pip install` should automatically grab the relevant platform wheel from pypi.org, or, if there is not one available, fall back to trying to compile from source. With PEP 517 this all happens in a reproduceable, isolated build environment so if you manage to get it building on your CI pipeline it is likely to work on the end user's machine.
I'm not sure what the state of wheels on Windows is these days. Is it possible to bundle DLLs in Windows wheels and have it "just work" the way it does for (most) Linux distros and OSX?
FWICS, wheel has no cryptographic signatures at present:
The minimal cryptographic signature support in the `wheel` reference implementation was removed by dholth;
The GPG ASC signature upload support present in legacy PyPI and then the warehouse was removed by dstufft;
"e2e" TUF is not yet implemented for PyPI, which signs everything uploaded with a key necessarily held in RAM; but there's no "e2e" because packages aren't signed before being uploaded to PyPI. Does twine download and check PyPI's TUF signature for whatever was uploaded?
I honestly haven't looked at conda's fairly new package signing support yet.
FWIR, in comparison to legacy python eggs with setup.py files, wheels aren't supposed to execute code as the user installing the package.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549331 :
https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel :
>>> Build Python wheels for all the platforms on CI with minimal configuration.
>>> Python wheels are great. Building them across Mac, Linux, Windows, on multiple versions of Python, is not.
>>> cibuildwheel is here to help. cibuildwheel runs on your CI server - currently it supports GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, and GitLab CI - and it builds and tests your wheels across all of your platforms
You're right, both the infrastructure and metadata for cryptographic signatures on Python packages (both wheels and sdists) isn't quite there yet.
At the moment, we're working towards the "e2e" scheme you've described by adding support for Sigstore[1] certificates and signatures, which will allow any number of identities (including email addresses and individual GitHub release workflows) to sign for packages. The integrity/availability of those signing artifacts will in turn be enforced through TUF, like you mentioned.
You can follow some of the related Sigstore-in-Python work here[2], and the ongoing Warehouse (PyPI) TUF work here[3]. We're also working on adding OpenID Connect token consumption[4] to Warehouse itself, meaning that you'll be able to bootstrap from a trusted GitHub workflow to a PyPI release token without needing to share any secrets.
[1]: https://www.sigstore.dev/
[2]: https://github.com/sigstore/sigstore-python
Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners
See the “Quantum Algorithm Zoo” for a comprehensive list of quantum algorithms.
https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
Massive amounts of work is needed to make these comprehensible.
> Tequila is an Extensible Quantum Information and Learning Architecture where the main goal is to simplify and accelerate implementation of new ideas for quantum algorithms. It operates on abstract data structures allowing the formulation, combination, automatic differentiation and optimization of generalized objectives. Tequila can execute the underlying quantum expectation values on state of the art simulators as well as on real quantum devices.
https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantum-backends
Quantum Backends currently supported by tequilahub/tequila: Qulacs, Qibo, Qiskit, Cirq (SymPy), PyQuil, QLM / myQLM
tequila-tutorials/Quantum_Calculator.ipynb https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila-tutorials/blob/main/Qu... :
> Welcome to the Tequila Calculator Tutorial. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a quantum circuit that simulates addition using Tequila. We also compare the performance of various backends that Tequila uses.
A problem that could possibly be quantum-optimized and an existing set of solutions: Scheduling
Optimize the scheduling problem better than e.g. SLURM and then generate a sufficient classical solution that executes in P-space on classical computers.
SLURM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slurm_Workload_Manager :
> Slurm uses a best fit algorithm based on Hilbert curve scheduling or fat tree network topology in order to optimize locality of task assignments on parallel computers.[2]
Additional applications and use cases: "Employee Scheduling" > "Ask HN: What algorithms should I research to code a conference scheduling app" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589911
> [Hilbert Curve Scheduling] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve_scheduling :
> [...] the Hilbert curve scheduling method turns a multidimensional task allocation problem into a one-dimensional space filling problem using Hilbert curves, assigning related tasks to locations with higher levels of proximity.[1] Other space filling curves may also be used in various computing applications for similar purposes.[2]
How to create a dashboard in Python with Jupyter Notebook
Surprised I hadn't heard of mplfinance. Similar code for econometric charts with bands and an annotation table with dated events would be useful and probably already exists somewhere. Maybe Predictive Forecasting libraries for time series already have something that could be factored out into a maintained package for such common charts? E.g. seaborn has real nice confidence intervals with matplotlib, too; though the matplotlib native color schemes are colorblind-friendly: "Perceptually Uniform Sequential colormaps" https://matplotlib.org/3.5.0/tutorials/colors/colormaps.html
awesome-jupyter > Rendering/Publishing/Conversion https://github.com/markusschanta/awesome-jupyter#renderingpu... :
> ContainDS Dashboards - JupyterHub extension to host authenticated scripts or notebooks in any framework (Voilà, Streamlit, Plotly Dash etc)
IIRC, ContainDS and Voila spawn per-dashboard and/or per-user Jupyter kernels with JupyterHub Spawners and Authenticators; like Binderhub ( https://mybinder.org/ ) but with required login and without repo2docker?
Streamlit lists Bokeh, Jupyter Voila, Panel, and Plotly Dash as Alternative dashboard approaches: https://github.com/MarcSkovMadsen/awesome-streamlit#alternat...
Says here that mljar/mercury is dual-licensed AGPL: https://github.com/mljar/mercury
From the readme I can't tell what powers the cited REST API functionality. From setup.py > mercury/requirements.txt it's DRF: Django REST Framework. https://github.com/mljar/mercury/blob/main/mercury/requireme...
E.g. BentoML is built on FastAPI which is async (sanic) and built by the DRF people, but FastAPI doesn't yet have the plethora of packages with tests/ supported by the Django community and DSF Django Software Foundation.
The REST API functionality allows to execute the notebook by POST request. It is powered by DRF. You can read more in the docs https://mercury-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/notebook-as-re...
The Y Combinator in Go with generics
I admire how someone passionate about a subject can provide in-depth explanation of _how_ that thing works. But to me, I still have absolutely no idea _why_ or _when_ I would need to apply this (even after reading the original post[0]). A motivating practical example would go a long way as an introduction before getting into the nitty-gritty details.
[0] https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2016/some-notes-on-the-y-combi...
The problem is marrying two ideas: lambda calculus (where all computation is done implicitly via anonymous functions), and recursion (where some set of functions call each other by name in a cycle).
This is a bit more interesting than it looks because ostensibly you're using the name of a function in its definition before that name ever has a meaning -- you're not really saying that you should literally call that symbol, but that the compiler should produce a function according to some set of rules that fills in the self references.
That doesn't work in lambda calculus though, where definitions are concrete and you don't have compiler magic to resolve the undefined symbol in your definition. A solution is to pass some function to itself as an argument, and you have a code pattern that goes along with it (the Y combinator).
This retains some "usefulness" in the sense that lambda calculus is still being explored for various purposes as a foundation for other things, and also in that languages based on that line of thought might benefit from using that structure explicitly. If you have some sort of syntactic sugar for recursion in your language of choice though and don't care about foundations then it's probably not very applicable.
Thanks, that helps a bit. So I get the what: a way to make an anonymous function recursive. As for the why, it seems to me it's because "lambda calculus doesn't have named functions." So this tells me this is a programming language design concern, as opposed to a pattern that can be used in everyday programming. Based on this, providing examples of how to implement a Y combinator in Clojure, Python, and Go is of questionable value IMO. And that's OK, since a lot of things we do don't need to have practical value (e.g. learning, understanding, etc).
Even if it doesn't have value for everyday programming, translating it into Clojure/Python/Go/whatever can make it easier to understand. Most explanations I've seen of the Y combinator just work in lambda calculus, which I at least find somewhat difficult to read; translating it into a more familiar language can make it easier to understand.
Fixed-point combinator > Y Combinator, Implementations in other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator
Y-combinator in like 100 languages: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Y_combinator #Python
Show HN: Pixie, open source observability for Kubernetes using eBPF
"Sysdig and Falco now powered by eBPF" too; https://sysdig.com/blog/sysdig-and-falco-now-powered-by-ebpf...
- "Linux Extended BPF (eBPF) Tracing Tools" https://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html lists eBPF commands, [CLI] frontends, relevant kernel components
- awesome-ebpf#manual-pages https://github.com/zoidbergwill/awesome-ebpf links to the kernel eBPF docs
- eBPF -> BPF Berkeley Packet Filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Packet_Filter :
> Extensions & optimizations: Since version 3.18, the Linux kernel includes an extended BPF virtual machine with ten 64-bit registers, termed extended BPF (eBPF). It can be used for non-networking purposes, such as for attaching eBPF programs to various tracepoints.[5][6][7] Since kernel version 3.19, eBPF filters can be attached to sockets,[8][9] and, since kernel version 4.1, to traffic control classifiers for the ingress and egress networking data path.[10][11] The original and obsolete version has been retroactively renamed to classic BPF (cBPF). Nowadays, the Linux kernel runs eBPF only and loaded cBPF bytecode is transparently translated into an eBPF representation in the kernel before program execution.[12] All bytecode is verified before running to prevent denial-of-service attacks. Until Linux 5.3, the verifier prohibited the use of loops.
- ... EVM/eWASM opcodes have a cost in gas/particles; https://github.com/crytic/evm-opcodes ... (dlt) Dataset indexing curation signals & incentives
"Tracing in Kubernetes: kubectl capture plugin." https://sysdig.com/blog/tracing-in-kubernetes-kubectl-captur...
kubectl-capture: https://github.com/sysdiglabs/kubectl-capture.git
Is it possible to do this sort of low level distributed tracing with Pixie e.g. conditionally when a pattern expression matches?
Pixie contributor here. Lots of great eBPF resources there!
For the question of whether it's possible to trace conditionally when a pattern expression matches, Pixie's philosophy is to trace everything and then allow you to use the querying language (called PxL) to query for the conditions you were looking for. The idea is that you may not know what you should have been looking for until you need to troubleshoot.
To be able to drop into an (e.g. rr) debugger on condition (e.g. by replicating that node's state ~State Share ) might result in a less appropriately comprehensive automated test suite, or faster tests?
Looks like Jaeger (Uber contributed to CNCF) supports OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, and exporting stats for Prometheus. https://github.com/cncf/landscape
Implementing strace in Rust
awesome-ebpf lists a few ebpf libs for rust; it looks like there are a few ~strace+ebpf tools: https://github.com/zoidbergwill/awesome-ebpf
Gitsign
Src: https://github.com/sigstore/gitsign
> Keyless Git signing with Sigstore!
> This is heavily inspired by [github/smimesign], but uses keyless Sigstore to sign Git commits with your own GitHub / OIDC identity
Physicists discover never-before seen particle sitting on a tabletop
Imagine the claim is justified, and pools of quantum fluids can transition into a phase that is decoupled from electromagnetic fields, and become dark matter. It would still be baryonic and would become ordinary matter just by heat. We don't have a lot of experience with what happens when quantum mechanical effects expand to a cosmological scale. Who would be surprised to find new physics there.
TIL about (models of) Superfluid Quantum Gravity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377395 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31383784
> How is "GR on Bernoulli", GM cannot describe n*x*oo more precisely than oo, and Conway's surreal infinities aren't good axioms either (for GR or for QM with (chaotic) fluids which perhaps need either infinities plural or superfluid QG (instead of QFT fwics); not making sense?
Is this coherent after so much constructive interference in fluids?
The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
>I agree that it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children. But if equity is the goal, we should be mandating that every eighth grader takes Algebra I—and then structure the entire pre-K to seventh grade student experience to ensure this is a legitimate possibility for every child. Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing?
I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do, but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer either. Everybody knows someone else that is better at math than they are, and someone who is not as good. It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
Subject categories such as "math" are also very broad. I struggled with math in elementary school, because it was mostly about memorization. 3 + 5 = 8. 6 x 7 = 42. Learning and being able to spit out those facts as quickly and flawlessly as possible was most of what I remember about math as a young kid. I was never good at that. I still am not good at that. I got Cs and sometimes lower grades in math.
Somehow, though, I passed a test in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. Suddenly stuff started making sense, and I could see a point to it. You could actually solve an interesting problem. It wasn't just regurgitation of facts. It became more about thinking and connecting concepts and even being creative. I started getting As in math, and continue to do well in High School with geometry, trig, and calculus, but up until algebra was introduced I would certainly not have demonstrated a gifted ability in "math".
You struggled with math in elementary school because of deeply flawed teaching. Even at that early age, it's not hard to understand that "3 + 5 = 8" is not something that you'd need to literally memorize. Of course, the fact that teaching quality can vary to such an extent is itself noteworthy.
I don't think I agree. 3 + 5 = 8 isn't something you need to literally memorize, but if you don't memorize such facts of basic arithmetic you're at a disadvantage when it comes to doing homework and tests. It's easier and less error-prone to memorize 8*7 than it is to work it out manually every time you see it until it sticks.
For what it's worth, I struggled with math in elementary school and especially high school -- I failed algebra I, then passed it with a D; then I failed algebra II before passing it* with a D. It wasn't until I was forced to take a business calculus class in my 20s that it started clicking, and I assure you the quality of instruction wasn't any better at the college level than it was in high school. (I did eventually graduate with honors with a math degree.)
Agreed. It does need memorization. Anyone who don't think so can try to add and multiply in hexadecimal, what is 0xA + 0xC and what is 0x8 * 0x6? It becomes quite obvious memorization is required when you try it in any other radix other than decimal(which is memorized already).
It might be quite obvious that memorization is convenient, but 'required' means "you can't do it any other way" and that's obviously incorrect.
IDK why we'd assume that there's a different cognitive process for learning mathematics with radix 10 than with radix 16?
Mathematics_education#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_education#Methods :
> [...] Rote learning: the teaching of mathematical results, definitions and concepts by repetition and memorisation typically without meaning or supported by mathematical reasoning. A derisory term is drill and kill. In traditional education, rote learning is used to teach multiplication tables, definitions, formulas, and other aspects of mathematics.
I think they mean that it is very useful to “cache” these primitive results, but it is absolutely possible to regenerate them if one is missing or the like.
Beautiful Soup
I found lxml.html a lot easier to work with than bs4, in case that helps anyone else.
On the off chance you were not aware, bs4 also supports[0] getting parse events from html5lib[1] which (as its name implies) is far more likely to parse the text the same way the browser would
0: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/index....
BeautifulSoup is an API for multiple parsers https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#installin... :
BeautifulSoup(markup, "html.parser")
BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml")
BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml-xml")
BeautifulSoup(markup, "xml")
BeautifulSoup(markup, "html5lib")
(EDIT: Is xml/html5 a good format for data serialization? defusedxml ... Simdjson, Apache arrow.js)
I was curious, so I tried that performance test you linked to on my machine with the various parsers:
==== Total trials: 100000 =====
bs4 lxml total time: 110.9
bs4 html.parser total time: 87.6
bs4 lxml-xml total time: 0.5
bs4 xml total time: 0.5
bs4 html5lib total time: 103.6
pq total time: 8.7
lxml (cssselect) total time: 8.8
lxml (xpath) total time: 5.6
regex total time: 13.8 (doesn't find all p)
You want a proper html 5 parser that can handle non valid documents. And the fastest one is https://github.com/kovidgoyal/html5-parser over 30x faster than html5lib
Formal methods only solve half my problems
From "Discover and Prevent Linux Kernel Zero-Day Exploit Using Formal Verification" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30194993 :
> Can there still be side channel attacks in formally verified systems? Can e.g. TLA+ help with that at all?
Side-channel attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attack
Yes, there can still be side-channel and out-of-band attacks in FV systems. For example, pouring water into the server rack. That’s a cheeky example, but things like timing side-channels via speculative execution and cache hits wouldn’t be addressed by FV at the software level. I think there is some ongoing research for verifying software/hardware interactions but I’m not aware of a product in widespread use that checks this.
The use of constant-time algorithms for crypto is a way to mitigate things like timing side-channels, and there are other techniques like disabling hyper-threading that can help.
The depressing fact is that side channels exist any time there’s a shared computing resource. The question is how noisy the channel is, the data rate, etc.
It might be argued that side channels exist whenever there is a shared channel; which is always, because plenoptic functions, wave function, air gap, ram bus mhz, nonlocal entanglement
Category:Side-channel attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Side-channel_attacks
Show HN: An open source alternative to Evernote (Self Hosted)
For me, Evernote’s killer feature is automatic OCR. (Subs that I can just upload a doc through my phone’s camera).
It looks like this doesn’t have that, unfortunately.
Noted! I'll see if this feature can be added.
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/plugins/curren... :
> [Teh ElasticSearch Core Ingest Attachment Processor Plugin]: The ingest attachment plugin lets Elasticsearch extract file attachments in common formats (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF) by using the Apache text extraction library Tika.
> The source field must be a base64 encoded binary. If you do not want to incur the overhead of converting back and forth between base64, you can use the CBOR format instead of JSON and specify the field as a bytes array instead of a string representation. The processor will skip the base64 decoding then
Apache Tika supported formats > Images > TesseractOCR: https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html https://tika.apache.org/2.4.0/formats.html#Image_formats :
> When extracting from images, it is also possible to chain in Tesseract, via the TesseractOCRParser, to have OCR performed on the contents of the image.
/? Meilisearch "ocr" GitHub;
Looks like e.g. paperbase (agpl) also implements ocr with tesseractocr: https://docs.paperbase.app/
tesseract-ocr/tesseract https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
/? https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sea... ctrl-f "ocr"
Would be good to have:
- Search results on a timeline indicating search match occurrence frequency; ability to "zoom in" or "drill down"
- "Find more like these" that prepopulates a search query form
- "Find more like these" that mutates the query pattern and displays the count for each original and mutated query along with the results; with optional optimization
The name needs to change.
This tool commits the cardinal sin of choosing a name GitSomething, where Git is only incidental to the domain that the product is concerned with (notetaking) and which is made worse by being yet another project that says "Git" where what it means is "we're using the GitHub API".
> You may not use the Marks in the following ways:
...
> In any way that indicates that Git favors one distribution, platform, product, etc. over another except where explicitly indicated in writing by Conservancy.
...
> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.
http://git-scm.com/about/trademark
> Let's say as an example that it does backups. We'd prefer it not call itself GitBackups. We don't endorse it, and it's just using the name to imply association that isn't there. You can come up with similar hypotheticals: GitMail that stores mailing list archives in Git, or GitWiki that uses Git as a backing store.
https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
What's also notable is that it conflicts with what is permitted: 'Commands like "git-foo" (so you run it as "git foo") are generally OK. This is Git's well-known extension mechanism[...]' When "git-foo" exists, we've approved "Git Foo" as a matching project name'. This combined with the fact that Git itself already ships with the "git-notes" command baked right in...
How do GitHub and Gitlab get away with this? Have they been given permission by Conservancy? Or are they in violation?
IIRC GitHub, (BitBucket), and GitLab existed before this new (license-addendum?) Trademark policy; but may be wrong. Which is to say that I don't recall there having been such a trademark policy at the time. Isn't it actually the "Old BSD License" that retains the "may not spaketh the name" clause?
(Bitcoin is also originally a LF project; in Git, like BitTorrent, and similar to BitGold only in name, for a reason. Bitcoin initially lacked a Foundation to hold trademarks, in particular.)
The choosealicense.com table of licenses in the appendix is a service of GitHub, and GitLab also donates free CI build runner minutes for Open Source projects: https://choosealicense.com/appendix/#trademark-use :
> Trademark use
> This license explicitly states that it does NOT grant trademark rights, even though licenses without such a statement probably do not grant any implicit trademark rights.
> IIRC GitHub, (BitBucket), and GitLab existed before this new (license-addendum?) Trademark policy
Trademarks are like copyright licenses where if you haven't been given explicit permission, then you don't have any. (The difference is that you can lose your trademark if you don't actively police misuse, but that's beside the point.)
Trademark > Registration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Registration
Speak in complete sentences.
How are you using your whiteboard at home?
"How to teach technical concepts with cartoons" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575411 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-15574890 :
> I learned about visual thinking and visual metaphor in application to business communications from "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" [ https://www.danroam.com/my-books ]
California parents could soon sue for social media addiction
Creating regulations like this may end up acting as a regulatory moat for existing social network companies. This probably makes the overall social media pie smaller overall but guarantees incumbents slice of the pie.
We've seen this happen in other highly regulated areas such as healthcare, telecommunications, etc.
I suspect the way things are trending, in 10 years, very few entrepreneurs would be willing to start a new social media company.
Clearly the regulators see this as a potential downside, which is why the $100 million in gross revenue provision was added.
On the other hand, we want to prevent new companies forming on the premise they can make money from gamifying their product so much it becomes addictive. Now, addictiveness has to have some definition to be useful. It can't be some odd random user who suffers from some kind of condition that prevents them from self-regulating their particular addiction whereas for example other people don't get addicted. There have to be some thresholds and milestones which indicate some service is "addictive" and then regulate against that.
I think when companies consult with behavioral, and other, psychologists in order to craft better ways to wring more engagement out of their users, those companies are intentionally making their products addictive. I don't see it as being much different than exploiting the addictive potential of new nicotine salts, or exploiting additives to cigarettes to do the same.
It can be spun however anyone wants to spin it, but at the end of the day, that's exploiting biology to subvert the will of others. And yes, I know this can describe advertising, as well.
Agreed. This is why the "metaverse" needs oversight as well. It will be a new frontier ripe for gamification, explication and general behavioral control.
No, every business optimizes yield.
Smart businesses optimize UX for conversion. FREE with no revenue is loss.
What's next? Suing vegas for the lights? You don't want to gamble? Don't go to Vegas.
They already have "How much time have I spent in here?" features.
You may not optimize yield because the children are compulsive addictive and it's the internet's fault.
What's next? Suing the bar for allowing you to spend time there? You'll have to make it more unbearable.
Just do a little more censorship for me too, mmkay?
How about the movies? Are they allowed to optimize for engagement by screen testing, or no?
It's not Art it's Ari: You want to sell an art film? Take it to an art film festival.
How are they supposed to know that you don't want to be in the store anymore?
So, just {Facebook,} has to have a timer at the top? Above the fold? Indicating cumulative time spent? What about Amazon?
For context here, there are many existing methods for limiting ones access to certain DNS domains and applications at the client. A reasonable person can:
- Add an /etc/hosts file entry: `etchosts='/etc/hosts' echo '127.0.0.1 domain.com www.domain.com' >> "${etchosts}`
- Install a browser extension for limiting time spent by domain
- Buy a router that can limit access by DNS domain and time of day (with regard for the essential communications of others who could bypass default DNS blocking with a VPN that can be expected to also regularly fail)
- Install an app (with access to the OS process space of other programs in order to restrict them) to limit time spent by application and/or DNS domain
-- Enable "Focus Mode" in Android; with the "Digital Wellbeing" application
-- Enable "Screen Time" in iOS; and also report on and limit usage of apps [and also to limit access to DNS domains, you'd also need required integration with a required browser]
You can install just an IM (Instant Messenging) app, and only then learn strategies for focusing amidst information overload and alert fatigue.
Some users do manage brands and provide customer service and support non-blocked but blocking essential communications, while managing their health at a desk all day. Some places literally require you to check your mobile device at the door. What should the default timer above the fold on just facebook be set to?
>What's next? Suing the bar for allowing you to spend time there?
Well, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop
> How are they supposed to know that you don't want to be in the store anymore?
Is the store - who you are not paying - a 1) business of public accomodation; or 2) obligated to provide such detection and ejection services; or 3) required to provide service?
You can't cut them off, they're Donny (who TOS don't apply to). You must cut them off, they can't they're not even. You are responsible for my behavior!
Best of luck suing the game publisher for optimizing the game, the author of a book you got for FREE for your time lost, suing the bar that you chose to frequent; do you think they're required to provide service to you? Did they prevent you from leaving? Did they prevent you from choosing to do something else, like entering a different URL in your address bar at will?
You should instead pay someone to provide the hypothetical service you're demanding fascist control over. CA is not a shareholder; and this new policy will be challenged and the state must apply said policy to all other businesses equally: you may not dog just {business you're trying to illegally dom} with an obligation to put a countdown or countup timer above the fold because they keep taking so much of your time.
EDIT: I just can't f believe they thought that only {Facebook} would have to check real name IDs at the door, run a stopwatch for each user with a clock above the fold, profile your mental health status, allow Donny to keep harassing just whoever, and tell you when it's time to go because you can't help yourself when it's time to leave the store they continued to optimize.
Microsoft Flight Simulator – Top Gun: Maverick Expansion
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/microsoft-flight-simulator
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator
/? "Microsoft Flight Simulator – Top Gun: Maverick Expansion" https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Microsoft+Flight+Simulato...
Generating websites with SPARQL and Snowman, part 1
Cool to see a project(Snowman[0]) I'm the creator of mentioned here on HN.
I created Snowman to allow one to use RDF/SPARQL even in the user-facing parts of ones stack(and to learn Go).
E.g. Hugo-academic has Microdata RDF (Go) Templates; and supports Markdown, Jupiter, LaTeX: https://github.com/wowchemy/starter-hugo-academic
"Build pages from data source" https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/5074
Index funds officially overtake active managers
Index fund: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund
> Comparison of index funds with index ETFs: In the United States, mutual funds price their assets by their current value every business day, usually at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time, when the New York Stock Exchange closes for the day. [40] Index ETFs, in contrast, are priced during normal trading hours, usually 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. Index ETFs are also sometimes weighted by revenue rather than market capitalization. [41]
Survivorship bias > Examples > In business, finance, and economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Why building profitable trading bot is hard?
I wants know why 90% of trading bots are fails. What's the reason behind it.
The stock market is very efficient - aka, the price reflects most, if not all available information at the time.
Therefore, a trading bot would need to trade on information that is not available to other bots, for it to be profitable. This is hard to achieve, and each bot that _do_ achieve it is making the market even more efficient.
Two investors can look at the same balance sheet and come to opposite conclusions. 90% of actively managed investment funds underperform the market. It's a hard problem, full stop. If you're good at solving hard problems, you could solve something less boring and probably make more.
Managed funds must pay managers; probably out of the returns.
ETFs (Electronically Traded Funds) have no fund management fees; like Class B stock, ETFs typically are not voting shares (which you don't have when you buy a mutual fund anyways).
Algotraders reference e.g. an S&P 500 ETF as the default benchmark for comparing a portfolio's performance.
Quarterly earnings reports are filed as XBRL XML. A value investor might argue that you don't need to rebalance a portfolio until there is new data about technical fundamentals for technical analysis.
The average bear trades on sentiment and comparatively doesn't at all appropriately hedge; this is part of Behavioral economics, the technical reason why some people actually can outperform the market, imho.
If the financial analyst does not have a (possibly piecewise) software function to at least test with backtesting and paper trading, do they even have an objective relative performance statistic? Your notebook or better should also model fees and have a parametrizable initial balance.
Here's the awesome-quant link directory: https://github.com/wilsonfreitas/awesome-quant
The Good Ol' Days of QBasic Nibbles
FWIU, QB64 will run nibbles.bas.
Nibbles (video game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)
Here's a PyGame version of snake/nibbles: https://github.com/caffeinemonster/python-pygame-nibbles/blo...
For in-browser games in Python with JupyterLite and the pyodide WASM kernel, there are now the pyb2d bindings for box2d: https://twitter.com/ThorstenBeier/status/1523573928702087169
Can we make a black hole? And if we could, what could we do with it?
I admit I know next to nothing about this stuff, but something doesn't add up. If everything has a Schwarzchild radius determined by its mass, then should we conclude that particles like electrons and protons also have a (very small) Schwarzchild radius? If the smaller it is, the sooner it explodes, then shouldn't atomic particles have all finished exploding a long time ago? When they explode, what do they eject, if not more subatomic particles like themselves? Alternatively, is the explanation that atomic particles are extended bodies whose sizes exceed their Schwarzchild radii instead being of point masses? If so, then what kind of stuff fills the interior of an electron? I don't have any answers but I have a feeling we're on shaky ground when we start trying to extrapolate general relativity concepts to atomic scales.
edit: typo
> If everything has a Schwarzchild radius determined by its mass, then should we conclude that particles like electrons and protons also have a (very small) Schwarzchild radius?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron
> If the smaller it is, the sooner it explodes, then shouldn't atomic particles have all finished exploding a long time ago?
See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378092
> I have a feeling we're on shaky ground when we start trying to extrapolate general relativity concepts to atomic scales.
Correct. We know nothing about how to marry General Relativity with atomic-scale physics (quantum mechanics). That's why everyone and their dog are looking for a theory of quantum gravity.
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron
Very interesting link - I suppose this could potentially make the problem slightly moot for electrons. Still, I don't think this works for other elementary particles, as black holes can't have color charge or weak hypercharge as far as I know (so they can't behave like quarks, gluons, W or Z bosons etc.)
> We know nothing about how to marry General Relativity with atomic-scale physics (quantum mechanics). That's why everyone and their dog are looking for a theory of quantum gravity.
True, though I think this is not even a problem in matching GR and QM, it is a problem in GR itself. The math of GR has infinities when looking at the center of a black hole, so we know there must be some other math that prevents the curvature from reaching infinity. We can of course easily invent infinitely many solutions to this problem, but there is no way to choose between them on an empirical basis, even in principle (since we can't ever experiment with the inside of a black hole).
A theory of quantum gravity would solve a different problem: GR is nonlinear, while QM is linear (if we ignore the Born rule) - so they can't describe the same system. Relatedly, if applying GR to a system described by a wave function, we are not able to compute how space time will curve given that a single particle(with its mass) is usually present at many points in space-time.
It is hoped that solving the second problem will also solve the first, but I'm not sure this is guaranteed.
> Still, I don't think this works for other elementary particles, as black holes can't have color charge or weak hypercharge as far as I know (so they can't behave like quarks, gluons, W or Z bosons etc.)
I think it is expected they can. The simple reason there are no explicit BH solutions with color charge is that, in contrast to electrodynamics, there's no classic field theory for the strong interaction that we could put into our Einstein-Hilbert action.
> I think this is not even a problem in matching GR and QM, it is a problem in GR itself.
Yes and no.
All kinds of theories have singularities and infinities. Classic electrodynamics is full of them and quantum field theory is, too. Nevertheless we still say the theories are fine and treat the singularities as pretty much nonphysical. ("Point particles don't really exist / a better theory will get rid of them", "We don't see the bare particles anyway, so let's remove the infinities using renormalization", et cetera.) Yes, spacetime singularities seem somewhat more severe, but I think we have good reasons to believe (e.g. the uncertainty relations) that a theory of quantum gravity would solve this conundrum. I mean, every single singularity we worry about in GR comes with infinite curvature and/or infinite energy densities, hence necessarily requires quantum mechanics to study.
On an unrelated note: Why is no one complaining that quantum field theory, from a mathematical point of view, is completely ill-defined? It surprises me time and again that people ascribe severe issues to GR ("It has singularities", "It's not quantum") and yet completely forget that the issues in quantum mechanics (both philophical and mathematical) are much more severe. GR, at the very least, is a mathematically absolutely rigorous theory, with well-defined objects and axioms and such. QFT, in turn, to this day is a toolbox of weird "shut-up-and-calculate" heuristics.
> We can of course easily invent infinitely many solutions to this problem, but there is no way to choose between them on an empirical basis, even in principle (since we can't ever experiment with the inside of a black hole).
There is one way: Come up with candidate theories of quantum gravity and with experiments to test quantum-gravitational effects outside a black hole (there are a few ideas) and select the right theory based on the experimental results and then have the theory predict what happens inside a black hole. Boom. If you say this approach is not valid as it'll remain a theoretical prediction and we still won't be able to peek inside a black hole, you're somewhat right. But right now we're having a discussion about spacetime singularities, which are a purely theoretical problem, too. No one has ever seen them.
> GR is nonlinear, while QM is linear (if we ignore the Born rule) - so they can't describe the same system.
We already know they are incompatible but linearity has nothing to do with it. The equations of motion of interacting quantum fields are non-linear, too. In fact, electrodynamics is, too, in some sense (backreaction & self-force), and we still managed to quantize it.
> Relatedly, if applying GR to a system described by a wave function, we are not able to compute how space time will curve given that a single particle(with its mass) is usually present at many points in space-time.
I wouldn't say this is just a related problem. This is the problem of quantum gravity.
> It is hoped that solving the second problem will also solve the first, but I'm not sure this is guaranteed.
Again, I think the reason people are hopeful are the uncertainty relations. A theory of quantum gravity necessarily has to incorporate them somehow.
/? Quantum gravity fluid
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:FV3voSY5-kYJ:sc...
"Gravity as a fluid dynamic phenomenon in a superfluid quantum space. Fluid quantum gravity and relativity." (2017)
> The hypothesis starts from considering the physical vacuum as a superfluid quantum medium, that we call superfluid quantum space (SQS), close to the previous concepts of quantum vacuum, quantum foam, superfluid vacuum etc. We usually believe that quantum vacuum is populated by an enormous amount of particle-antiparticle pairs whose life is extremely short, in a continuous foaming of formation and annihilation. Here we move further and we hypothesize that these particles are superfluid symmetric vortices of those quanta constituting the cosmic superfluid (probably dark energy). Because of superfluidity, these vortices can have an indeterminately long life. Vorticity is interpreted as spin (a particle's internal motion). Due to non-zero, positive viscosity of the SQS, and to Bernoulli pressure, these vortices attract the surrounding quanta, pressure decreases and the consequent incoming flow of quanta lets arise a gravitational potential. This is called superfluid quantum gravity. In this model we don't resort to gravitons. Once comparing superfluid quantum gravity with general relativity, it is evident how a hydrodynamic gravity could fully account for the relativistic effects attributed to spacetime distortion, where the space curvature is substituted by flows of quanta. Also special relativity can be merged in the hydrodynamics of a SQS and we obtain a general simplification of Einstein's relativity under the single effect of superfluid quantum gravity.
IIRC, when I searched gscholar for "wave-particle-[fluid]" duality" a few weeks ago there were even more recent papers.
Does Quantum Chaos describe fluids or superfluids? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chaos
Do CAS tools must stop reducing symbolic expressions describe infinity such that?:
assert n*x*oo == oo
Sorry, but I'm afraid you're not making a lot of sense.
How is "GR on Bernoulli", GM cannot describe nxoo more precisely than oo, and Conway's surreal infinities aren't good axioms either (for GR or for QM with (chaotic) fluids which perhaps need either infinities plural or superfluid QG (instead of QFT fwics); not making sense?
No, I'm afraid not. You might want to provide some background on what you're trying to say and, also, on your notation.
DNS over Dedicated QUIC Connections
> Abstract: This document describes the use of QUIC to provide transport confidentiality for DNS. The encryption provided by QUIC has similar properties to those provided by TLS, while QUIC transport eliminates the head-of-line blocking issues inherent with TCP and provides more efficient packet-loss recovery than UDP. DNS over QUIC (DoQ) has privacy properties similar to DNS over TLS (DoT) specified in RFC 7858, and latency characteristics similar to classic DNS over UDP. This specification describes the use of DoQ as a general-purpose transport for DNS and includes the use of DoQ for stub to recursive, recursive to authoritative, and zone transfer scenarios.
> [...] DNS over HTTPS (DoH) [RFC8484] can be used with HTTP/3 to get some of the benefits of QUIC. However, a lightweight direct mapping for DoQ can be regarded as a more natural fit for both the recursive to authoritative and zone transfer scenarios, which rarely involve intermediaries. In these scenarios, the additional overhead of HTTP is not offset by, for example, benefits of HTTP proxying and caching behavior.
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Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold
I strongly feel that the spammers thing is smoke and mirrors.
The deal at $54.20 was maybe OK for him a month ago (it was great for Twitter because nobody else was interested at that price). Since then, Twitter reported disappointing numbers for the past quarter, and the entire market took a nose dive, with tech hit especially hard.
TWTR stock price was in the mid-30s before Musk's offer. Without the offer, and with the disappointing numbers, and with the recent market development, one could reasonably assume that the stock would be below 30 today.
Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.
When Musk started selling his TSLA shares to buy Twitter, TSLA fell by like $200 or like 20%.
It was becoming obvious that to buy Twitter, TSLA value would have to decline severely. IIRC, Musk only got around to selling $8 Billion pretax before quitting.
Musk thought he could afford Twitter. He sells some TSLA and the market collapses, and he suddenly decides against it.
Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Musk doesn't have the cash for the deal anymore (maybe he never had the cash for the deal). I guess Musk is looking at the $1 Billion ejection clause now and trying to weasel around it.
But at this rate, it looks like Musk owes Twitter $1 billion cash for this broke deal.
This is the pretty good point to all the "richest person" "net worth XX Billion" lists and calculations.
Most if not all of these people can't liquidate even close to their "net worth"
If you can get several tens of millions of dollars, liquid, on fairly short notice, there's almost nothing you can't buy on a whim. You may as well have infinite money. It doesn't matter that you can't liquidate another 90-99% of your net worth easily. You borrow $60m for that second yacht, then pay it off as soon as the tax situation looks favorable for realizing some gains. No big deal. Live like (er, better than) a king, pay taxes like a pauper. It's the American way.
Larger sums are only really useful for making big-splash investments. Like this. As far as personal spending goes, it's no obstacle, so it doesn't matter that they can't easily turn their entire net worth into a literal billions-of-dollars balance in a checking account.
Show HN: Pythondocs.xyz – Live search for Python documentation
Hi everyone!
I've been working on a web search interface for Python's documentation as a personal project, and I think it's ready for other people to use...
Please give it a go (and join me in praying to the server gods):
Here's the tech stack for those interested:
- Parser: Beautiful Soup + Mozilla Bleach
- Database: in-memory SQLite (aiosqlite) + SQLAlchemy
- Web server: FastAPI + Uvicorn + Jinja2
- Front end: Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js
I have ideas for future improvements but hopefully the current version is useful to someone.
Let me know what you think!
Does python not have built in documentation search? In R I use `??searchterm`.
It has help(), but I don't think there's a nice search feature included.
I mean you could use string methods to search for something of course, help just returns a string.
Then again, it's Python. There's probably some kind of
import search from helpTools
The `pydoc` / `python -m pydoc` module doesn't do search; it would be O(n) for every search like grep without e.g. a sphinx searchindex: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pydoc.html
Sphinx searchindex.js does Porter stemming for English and other languages: https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/blob/5.x/sphinx/search/...
sphinxcontrib.websupport.search supports Xapian, Whoosh (Python), and null: https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinxcontrib-websupport/blob/...
sphinx-elasticsearch https://github.com/zeitonline/sphinx_elasticsearch :
> This is a stand-alone extraction of the functionality used by readthedocs.org, compatible with elasticsearch-6.
MeiliSearch (rust) compared with ElasticSearch (java), Algolia, TypeSense (C++): https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/compa...
Is there a good way to index each sphinx doc set's searchindex.js?
Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best.
The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals and paying for salaries of the faculty. And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. They're there to be students, not workers. That's why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills.
The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations. If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way. The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this.
Having students work is not a bad thing. But it isn't some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school. To make this possible you'd have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country. And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.
I actually entirely disagree with the premise that students should work. I think it's wrong, aside from a perhaps holiday job. They should study, that's it. If they are not busy enough to study, then they don't study hard enough.
That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.
True, being a student should be considered a full-time job. I'm from Europe and we get stipends that depend on grades (and financial situation), and studying is at least somewhat considered a duty and responsibility towards society then, instead of the American attitude where students are service consumers, customers who must be pandered to. You can see where that attitude has led on American campuses.
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What are your most used self-hosted applications?
awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted lists quite a few: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Sqldiff: SQLite Database Difference Utility
Which {SQL,} databases do this as a native, online database feature; so you don't have to pull backups to sqldiff?
E.g. django-reversion and VDM do versioned domain model on top of SQL, but not with native temporal database features.
Many apps probably could or should be written as mostly-append-only - not necessarily blocking until the previous record is available to hash – but very few apps are written that way, so run sqldiff offline.
There is Dolt, which started out as git for tables but is turning into a MySQL compatible database with good versioning. (Including branches and merges.)
dolthub/dolt https://github.com/dolthub/dolt:
dolt clone
dolt pull
dolt push
dolt checkout
dolt branch
dolt commit
dolt merge
dolt blame
dolt diff
EthicalML/awesome-production-machine-learning#model-and-data-versioning: https://github.com/EthicalML/awesome-production-machine-lear...
GitBOM: Enabling universal artifact traceability in software supply chains
From https://gitbom.dev/resources/whitepaper/ :
> For this reason we propose two areas of work:
> 1. enhancing artifact-generating tools (e.g., compilers, linkers, and container image generators) to also output metadata regarding their inputs and outputs
> 2. defining a storage format which represents the minimum information to describe the artifact relationship tree, and which uses git’s on-disk storage format
> Following from (1), this approach will require minimal to no effort on the part of open source project maintainers, thus significantly increasing its chances of widespread adoption as compared to any approach which requires maintainers to perform additional actions (e.g., implementing substantive changes in their CI/CD or package build pipeline to generate an SBOM).
Requirements traceability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_traceability
codemeta/codemeta - Minimal metadata schemas for science software and code, in JSON-LD: https://github.com/codemeta/codemeta
Compostable fungi-based replacement for styrofoam
I'm heartened by the interest in better packaging and it seems like it's having a moment. Last week Cruz Foam[0] (probably a direct competitor) had an announcement that it had some celebrity investors[1]. It's probably not a popular opinion but I think adding more regulations or incentives (tax breaks) to discourage the use of non-biodegradable packaging, especially in foods, is long overdue.
[0] - https://www.cruzfoam.com [1] - https://www.cruzfoam.com/post/meet-our-new-investors-advisor...
Yeah, we have incentives to insulate homes but they all use terrible tech. The best solution still off-gases and can be dangerous if done improperly.
Home insulation has a longer useful life than most packaging, but you're right that it still usually ends up in a landfill. However the current incentives for home insulation are very different - usually to reduce home heating/cooling costs and reduced energy consumption is usually an environmentally sound policy. Should there be further incentives to encourage insulation alternatives which have a more eco-friendly end of life? Absolutely. And that is likely a harder problem given the productive lifetime of an average home, but definitely a worthy place to also put further incentives.
I think one of the solutions may be based on hemp, currently known as hempcrete or hemp concrete - essentially a mix of hemp hurd (the woody essence of the hemp plant), hydraulic lime, and water.
You mix it up and then all you need is just the wooden frame (if you're building load bearing walls), then you wrap it in hempcrete (floors, walls & roof), apply some mud plaster and you're done. No need for 6-10 layers full of plastics & glues.
Thanks to use of lime instead of cement the building even captures CO2, as the walls literally turn into stone over time.
Some hemp buildings are 200+ years old, in some cave in india they've even found 1500 y.o. hempcrete, and you can compost whole building at EOL.
Some other benefits: non-toxic, no off-gassing, no solvents, mold resistance, high vapor permeability, humidity control, durable, sustainable, carbon sequestration, fire and pest resistance, passive self regulation of temperature and humidity, great insulator
Can hempcrete be made from Mars or Moon aggregate instead of lime, and 4d printed?
FWIU, lime requires coral for production? Is lime sustainable?
Alternative solutions for: structural wood frame in a hempcrete structure: stacking hempcrete blocks on structural forms that are stronger and more insulting than structural concrete; green concrete, a carbon and thermal gradient sink; and Hempwood, which is apparently stronger than spec lumber of the same dimensions as well.
most lime comes from limestone, extracted by quarries/mines- although sometimes it is sourced from coral
the process of producing lime can involve a number of not-very-sustainable steps, hopefully which can be substituted for more environmentally responsible alternatives
How does this product compare to aerogel, which is inorganic without minor radiation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
> Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying or freeze-drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly dried off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. Kistler's later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s.[12]
Can aerogels be made with {formed,?} fungi-based production processes?
Aerogels tend to be fairly brittle, but more recent innovations make them probably work.
Fundamentally they are defined when you remove a solvent from a gel supercritically. High temperatures or pressures. Not very friendly for organics, but probably could work with a polymer.
Of course if you just want a low density polymer with air in it that's just styrofoam. The organic part is the interesting bit, and organic stuff usually has better strength due to multi-dimensional patterning whereas an aerogel would tend to have a single structure throughout.
In this domain it's important to remember that organic means carbon-containing, the word you're looking for is biological or biochemical. Polystyrene is an organic compound.
Sorry to have confused you. I used simplified language because this is not a site filled with chemists and I wanted to avoid confusing people.
Is it a carbon sink organic compound? Does it offgas VOCs?
HS chem was years ago. Does jsmol/pymol work in Jupiter notebooks? That probably doesn't at all model heat or other QFT or QG fields.
Though this one probably doesn't require an understanding of how quantum chemistry is actually occurring (Q12 STEM), I found this for protyping, which "operates on abstract data structures allowing the formulation, combination, automatic differentiation and optimization of generalized objectives. Tequila can execute the underlying quantum expectation values on state of the art simulators as well as on real quantum devices." https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantum-backends
I'm not sure this is a useful framing.
If the chemicals used to make an aerogel are carbon sinks, the aerogel will be as well unless the energy use is higher than the sunk carbon.
If it's not biological, it's usually not a carbon sink. There are exceptions.
And as for outgassing, in my experience any polymer that you do gas sampling over in a closed container will be show some offgassing of something. It's just the nature of solids to release vapor, if there is zero in the gas phase then there's a lot of entropic force to drive there to be at least one in the gas phase. Like, a huge entropic driving force. Everything outgasses.
Whether there's a lot of outgassing depends on the chemicals that are broken down and the volatility and the temperature, I think this will almost always be low but measurable for long chain polymers, and modest for short chain and low density polymers (think how foam insulation smells when it gets heated in the sun if you've ever seen it). What is outgassed is definitely more important, so it really just is super case by case to do an actual safety analysis to compare them, and it would depend on the use conditions (temperature, sunlight, etc).
I don't know anything about jsmol or pymol, I don't think a software suite is necessary here. These processes are pretty basic and you can just look up relative volatilities and breakdown products for a given case. You definitely don't want to try to simulate the thermal breakdown of a polymer (which you'd define statistically with potentially hundreds of thousands of atoms each) -- especially not quantum mechanically -- into the gas phase. There are a lot of opportunities for much more basic issues than software libraries; like how you model the gas around the solid surface and what the structure of the solid surface is. Does gas move due to outside flow? Does it also carry away heat?
It's a hugely complex thing to actually calculate (and even for a few atoms QM simulations are horrific and easy to mess up) so instead I personally would just rely on the rules of thumb I talked about first and then look up actual data from bulk materials property measurements. I definitely wouldn't touch a simulation when real bulk property measurements are easily available.
Evolution is not a tree of life but a fuzzy network
I've always said it's not the Tree of Life, but rather the DAG of Life.
It may not even be acyclic. For example it appears fetal DNA is permanently detectable in mothers and may even have health benefits that conceivably increase the mother’s evolutionary fitness.
How can it be acyclic? A phylogenetic tree is a DAG. Organisms sharing DNA? That's definitely a cyclic graph.
If there were Schema.org/Animal and/or schema:AnimalInstance classes, what do you list under a :breed property to indicate that e.g. one parent is breed X and another is breed Y?! That's definitely not a DAG; that looks like a feature clustering dendrogram.
DNA barcoding > Mismatches between conventional (morphological) and barcode based identification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcoding#Mismatches_betwe...
Taxonomy (biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)
FWIU, there's at least one DNA-based organism naming system; IDK how much that helps resolve :Animal and :AnimalInstance if at all?
My assumption as someone not formally trained in advanced biology is that the phylogenetic tree has an implied arrow of time, and each node of the tree is a point where a mutation occurred that was sufficient to create a new and separate family/order/genus/etc afterwards, with leaf nodes representing species.
In this sense a cycle can’t occur because a branch would need to reach back in time and rejoin with an ancestral branch. It would be a different kind of grandfather paradox: who would be the ancestor and who the descendant in a cycle?
Maybe someone could help point out the flaws in this model.
Your assumption is true, but only for rooted phylogenetic trees. In unrooted trees the node representing the most ancestral state is absent and thus no directionality can be determined.
U.S. interest rates have soared everywhere but savings accounts
The issue is that there is no incentive for banks to increase interest rates on accounts as they are already sitting on too much cash. Banks make money by lending money out, in times where banks are strapped for cash on hand, you will see interest rates increase. I don’t see this changing in the near future.
> "...there is no incentive for banks to increase interest rates on accounts as they are already sitting on too much cash."
and folks wonder why banks are so strictly regulated... no, banks are never sitting on too much cash unless they've made a marketing and/or an operational error. most banks are highly levered, meaning they're lending out, say, 10× the cash they hold, so they never "have too much cash on hand". quite the opposite. banks continually lobby regulatory agencies to raise their leverage thresholds so they can lever up even more and rake in more of that sweet, nearly risk-free[0] cash flow.
that they don't raise savings rates is purely out of greed, not necessity. they're also under no competitive pressure to do so, which indicates a malfunctioning market (functioning markets are by definition competitive). and more galling, they charge you hidden fees out the wazoo for the "privilege" of banking in a mine field.
banks are core infrastructure, much like roads and housing. i'd rather go back to a simpler form where banks were only allowed to make money on the spread between lending and savings rates, making them boring and having to compete (with higher savings rates, for example) for your business. all the risk-taking extensions to banking can still exist, just in a separate, firewalled entity with no access to that (nearly) risk-free cash flow.
[0]: risk-free in the finance sense of being free of idiosyncratic risk, not systemic risk.
You’ve just described the Glass-Steagall act. It has a long and storied history.
It was created in response to the Great Depression, then repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act because money. Then the Dodd-Frank act tried to have it reinstated but failed, also because money.
You may already be familiar with all of this but mentioning in case you’re not.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_legislation)
There’s a quite brilliant documentary that came out in 2010, Inside Job, that covers this, but which was completely overshadowed by the much less informative The Big Short which came out 5 years later.
There was a separation between savings and investment banking between ~1933-1999.
Glass–Steagall in post-financial crisis reform debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_in_post...
(Edit: Monetary policy / Monetarism > Current State , Liquidity trap > Global financial crises of 2008 and 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap )
How do microlending and DeFi rates democratize subsidized capital availability?
From IL-RFC-1 Interledger Architecture https://interledger.org/rfcs/0001-interledger-architecture/ :
> Settlement for one account MUST NOT depend on the status of any other accounts.
> If settlement of one account in the Interledger is contingent on the status of another account or relationship, this could create the threat of cascading risks and failures, similar to problems that occurred during the 2008 global financial crisis. Nodes can protect themselves from such risks by choosing to use settlement technologies such as collateralized payment channels where available. These types of arrangements can provide high-speed settlement without a risk that the other side may not pay. For more information on different ledger types and settlement strategies, see IL-RFC-22: Hashed Timelock Agreements.
> Nodes can also choose never to settle their obligations. This configuration may be useful when several nodes representing different pieces of software or devices are all owned by the same person or business, and all their traffic with the outside world goes through a single “home router” connector. This is the model of `moneyd`, one of the current implementations of Interledger.
Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond
> LLVM history: Back then we recognized some really interesting benchmarks and we didn’t recall anybody trying to really benchmark sorts on different data patterns for standard libraries.
Timsort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort :
> In the worst case, Timsort takes O(n log n) comparisons to sort an array of n elements. In the best case, which occurs when the input is already sorted, it runs in linear time, meaning that it is an adaptive sorting algorithm. [3]
> It is advantageous over Quicksort for sorting object references or pointers because these require expensive memory indirection to access data and perform comparisons and Quicksort's cache coherence benefits are greatly reduced. [...]
> Timsort has been Python's standard sorting algorithm since version 2.3 [~2002]. It is also used to sort arrays of non-primitive type in Java SE 7,[4] on the Android platform,[5] in GNU Octave,[6] on V8,[7] Swift,[8] and Rust.[9]
Sorting algorithm > Comparison of algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm#Comparison_o...
Schwartzian transform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform :
> In Python 2.4 and above, both the sorted() function and the in-place list.sort() method take a key= parameter that allows the user to provide a "key function" (like foo in the examples above). In Python 3 and above, use of the key function is the only way to specify a custom sort order (the previously supported cmp= parameter that allowed the user to provide a "comparison function" was removed). Before Python 2.4, developers would use the lisp-originated decorate–sort–undecorate (DSU) idiom,[2] usually by wrapping the objects in a (sortkey, object) tuple
Big-O Cheatsheet https://www.bigocheatsheet.com/
Quicksort in Python 7 ways (and many other languages) on RosettaCode: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort#Py...
Thanks, I'll remove the note about "recalling"
xeus-cling didn't exist back then: https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus-cling#a-c-notebook
https://github.com/fffaraz/awesome-cpp#debug
A standard way to benchmark and chart {sorting algorithms, web framework benchmarks,} would be great.
The TechEmpower "framework overhead" benchmarks might have at least average case sorting in there somewhere: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...
awesome-algorithms https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms#github-librari...
awesome-theoretical-computer-science > Machine Learning Theory, Physics; Grover's; and surely something is faster than Timsort: https://github.com/mostafatouny/awesome-theoretical-computer...
Christ, the description on that second repo is so comically terribly spelled that I can’t figure out whether it’s a joke:
> The interdicplinary of Mathematics and Computer Science, Distinguisehed by its emphasis on mathemtical technique and rigour.
(Perhaps a witty satire on the reputation of mathmos for being godawful at anything literary...)
Deep Learning Poised to ‘Blow Up’ Famed Fluid Equations
Euler equations (fluid dynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_equations_(fluid_dynamic...
> In fluid dynamics, the Euler equations are a set of quasilinear partial differential equations governing adiabatic and inviscid flow. They are named after Leonhard Euler. In particular, they correspond to the Navier–Stokes equations with zero viscosity and zero thermal conductivity. [1]
Navier–Stokes equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equation...
> The Navier–Stokes equations mathematically express conservation of momentum and conservation of mass for Newtonian fluids.
Computational fluid dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics
Numerical methods in fluid mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_methods_in_fluid_mec...
- [ ] Quantum fluid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluid
> Quantum mechanical effects become significant for physics in the range of the de Broglie wavelength. For condensed matter, this is when the de Broglie wavelength of a particle is greater than the spacing between the particles in the lattice that comprises the matter. [...]
> The above temperature limit T has different meaning depending on the quantum statistics followed by each system, but generally refers to the point at which the system manifests quantum fluid properties. For a system of fermions, T is an estimation of the Fermi energy of the system, where processes important to phenomena such as superconductivity take place. For bosons, T gives an estimation of the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature.
Classical fluid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fluid
> Classical fluids [1] are systems of particles which retain a definite volume, and are at sufficiently high temperatures (compared to their Fermi energy) that quantum effects can be neglected [...] Common liquids, e.g., liquid air, gasoline etc., are essentially mixtures of classical fluids. Electrolytes, molten salts, salts dissolved in water, are classical charged fluids. A classical fluid when cooled undergoes a freezing transition. On heating it undergoes an evaporation transition and becomes a classical gas that obeys Boltzmann statistics.
Chaos theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
> Chaos theory is [...] focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws highly sensitive to initial conditions in dynamical systems that were thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. [1] Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.
Quantum chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chaos
> If quantum mechanics does not demonstrate an exponential sensitivity to initial conditions, how can exponential sensitivity to initial conditions arise in classical chaos, which must be the correspondence principle limit of quantum mechanics?
... in dynamic, nonlinear - possibly adaptive - complex systems.
google/jax-cfd https://github.com/google/jax-cfd#other-awesome-projects lists "Other differentiable CFD codes compatible with deep learning"
FWIU the AlphaZero for Fusion optimization is for the non-fluid plasma Deep Learning convex optimization part of the problem?
Is it ever enough to model just fluids, is modeling quantum chemistry necessary as well?
pip install tequila-basic
https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantumchemistry
https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila-tutorials/blob/main/Ch...
awesome-fluid-dynamics https://github.com/lento234/awesome-fluid-dynamics :
- "12 Steps to Navier-Stokes"
- Differential programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming : gradients; sometimes gradient descent
- Neural Networks for PDE
"Differentiable function" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_function
> In mathematics, a differentiable function of one real variable is a function whose derivative exists at each point in its domain
If there is a ZeroDivisionError because a denominator is zero, is that actually a differentiable function?
-x**-1
-1/x
Divergence theorem ... Fluid diverconvergences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_theorem :
> The divergence theorem is an important result for the mathematics of physics and engineering, particularly in electrostatics and fluid dynamics. In these fields, it is usually applied in three dimensions. However, it generalizes to any number of dimensions. In one dimension, it is equivalent to integration by parts. In two dimensions, it is equivalent to Green's theorem. [...] Explanation using liquid flow [...]
"Logarithms yearning to be free" re: symbolic limits and currently non-axiomatic Infinity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015139
... Quantum thermodynamics, fluids, and chaotic divergence
The "derivative" at a certain point is defined as the limit of the ratio between function differences and argument differences.
In the context of derivatives, "exists" means that this limit is a finite number.
If the derivative function has an expression which is a fraction whose denominator becomes null at a point, the derivative may exist or not exist at that point.
If the corresponding numerator at that point is non-null (i.e. the derivative is infinite), then the derivative does not exist and the original function is not differentiable at that point.
If the numerator is also null, the derivative may exist or not at that point, depending on whether the limit of the derivative exists or not.
Are there no symbolic results from derivatives of any order?
Is it more correct to say that, if the denominator is zero at that point, the derivative is just non-Real because it's e.g. `n*x*oo`?
Practically, do we just say that such actually discontinuous functions are still mostly differentiable but the derivative does not exist in non-symbolic space?
> ... Quantum thermodynamics, fluids, and chaotic divergence
FWIW, does [quantum] thermodynamics predict emergent behaviors amongst self-organizing systems apparently at least temporarily contradicting a tendency to entropic decay?
My understanding is that no: fluid dynamics, quantum fluid dynamics, and quantum chemistry are not sufficient to describe and thus cannot predict emergent behaviors in complex nonlinear - possibly emergently adaptive - complex systems.
Emergence occurs in/of/by/within/betwixt/between systems; in application emergent programs require human-level intelligence ethical filters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Perhaps before describing physical systems with current best known descriptions as multi-field (QFT,QQ,) wave-particle[-fluid] interactions with convergent and divergent e.g convection, it's appropriate to compare the difference between Classical and Quantum Wave Interference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_interference#Quantum_inte...
> some of the differences between classical wave interference and quantum interference: (a) In classical interference, two different waves interfere; In quantum interference, the wavefunction interferes with itself. (b) Classical interference is obtained simply by adding the displacements from equilibrium (or amplitudes) of the two waves; In quantum interference, the effect occurs for the probability function associated with the wavefunction and therefore the absolute value of the wavefunction squared. (c) The interference involves different types of mathematical functions: A classical wave is a real function representing the displacement from an equilibrium position; a quantum wavefunction is a complex function. A classical wave at any point can be positive or negative; the quantum probability function is non-negative.
Thus our best descriptions of emergent behavior in fluids (and chemicals and fields) must presumably be composed at least in part from quantum wave functions that e.g. Navier-Stokes also fit for; with a fitness function.
Gigahertz topological valley Hall effect in NEMS phononic crystals
"Gigahertz topological valley Hall effect in nanoelectromechanical phononic crystals" (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-022-00732-y
> Topological phononic crystals can manipulate elastic waves that propagate in solids without being backscattered, and could be used to develop integrated acousto-electronic systems for classical and quantum information processing. However, acoustic topological metamaterials have been mainly limited to macroscale systems that operate at low (kilohertz to megahertz) frequencies. Here we report a topological valley Hall effect in nanoelectromechanical aluminium nitride membranes at gigahertz (up to 1.06 GHz) frequencies. We visualize the propagation of elastic waves through phononic crystals with high sensitivity (10–100 fm) and spatial resolution (10–100 nm) using transmission-mode microwave impedance microscopy. The valley Hall edge states, which are protected by band topology, are observed in both real and momentum space. Robust valley-polarized transport is evident from wave transmission across local disorder and around sharp corners. We also show that the system can be used to create an acoustic beamsplitter.
Quantum Hall effect > Photonic quantum Hall effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect
> The quantum Hall effect, in addition to being observed in two-dimensional electron systems, can be observed in photons. Photons do not possess inherent electric charge, but through the manipulation of discrete optical resonators and coupling phases or on-site phases, an artificial magnetic field can be created. [17][18][19][20][21] This process can be expressed through a metaphor of photons bouncing between multiple mirrors. By shooting the light across multiple mirrors, the photons are routed and gain additional phase proportional to their angular momentum. This creates an effect like they are in a magnetic field.
The Hall effect article describes how Superposition states can be prepared with the Hall effect.
So, in crystal lattices, is there less noise due to scattering?
[deleted]
Doing small network scientific machine learning in Julia faster than PyTorch
A library I designed a few years ago (https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow) is also much faster than pytorch/tensorflow in these cases.
In "small" or "very sparse" setups, you're memory bound, not compute bound. TF and Pytorch are bad at that because they assume memory movements are worth it and do very little in-place operations.
Different tools for different jobs.
In "small" setups, you're actually more likely to be overhead-bound if anything (especially on CPU).
Would you mind defining "overhead"?
IMO, one of the big sources of overhead is the PCIe bus.
Transferring data to-and-from the PCIe / GPU takes time. If the CPU is faster and can perform the calculation before the PCIe is done transferring, then there's no point even touching the GPU.
PCIe is on the scale of ~5000 nanoseconds (20,000 CPU cycles assuming 4GHz). A PCIe write, then read could be ~40,000 CPU cycles or so, and it turns out that a lot of things can be done in that time before the GPU was even _NOTIFIED_ that there was work to do.
CPUs can contact other CPU-cores within 50 to 500 nanoseconds or so, depending on the distance. A 64-core CPU could then have 64-cores * 18000 clocks == ~1-million CPU-clock cycles before the GPU gets any message at all.
There's no mention of GPUs, TPUs, or indeed QPUs in the memory hierarchy described by Wikipedia!
Locality of reference ("Data locality") > Spatial and temporal locality usage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference
Memory hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hierarchy :
> Most modern CPUs are so fast that for most program workloads, the bottleneck is the locality of reference of memory accesses and the efficiency of the caching and memory transfer between different levels of the hierarchy [citation needed]. As a result, the CPU spends much of its time idling, waiting for memory I/O to complete. This is sometimes called the space cost, as a larger memory object is more likely to overflow a small/fast level and require use of a larger/slower level. The resulting load on memory use is known as pressure (respectively register pressure, cache pressure, and (main) memory pressure). Terms for data being missing from a higher level and needing to be fetched from a lower level are, respectively: register spilling (due to register pressure: register to cache), cache miss (cache to main memory), and (hard) page fault (main memory to disk).
Is it that PCIe is necessarily implied by the debuggable pipeline specified by the von Neumann architecture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
Otherwise, computation within RAM avoids interconnect saturation.
"Neuromorphic" computing, stateful RAM with operators mapped to particle interactions:
Memristor > Derivative devices > memtransistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#Derivative_devices
Quantum reservoir computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_computing#Quantum_re...
But these still need a faster and wider (and qubit) bus than PCIe, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Universe :
> Lloyd also postulates that the Universe can be fully simulated using a quantum computer; however, in the absence of a theory of quantum gravity, such a simulation is not yet possible. "Particles not only collide, they compute."
Quantum on Silicon looks cheaper in today dollars.
Devide the universe in QFT field-equal halves A and B, take energy from A to make B look like A, then add qubit error correction, and tell me if there's enough energy to simulate the actual universe on a universe QC with no instruction pipeline.
Logarithms yearning to be free
> The author opens with the example of finding the antiderivative of xn. When n ≠ -1 the antiderivative is another power function, but when n = -1 it’s a logarithm.
What a neat limit. Probably best to leave the powerfn/logfn() as a dumb symbolic symbol until the end (until after later parameter substitution)?
I don't follow. The antiderivative fails because of division by zero. What limit? And what does symbolic manip do?
The idea is that you want to calculate
integral{from t=0, to t=x} t^{-1+0} dx
but you calculate instead
f(x) = lim_{ε->0} [ integral{from t=0, to t=x} t^{-1+ε} dx ]
that is just
= lim_{ε->0} [ (t^ε - 1) / ε ]
replacing t^ε
= lim_{ε->0} [ (e^(ln(t)*ε) - 1) / ε ]
by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27H%C3%B4pital%27s_rule
= lim_{ε->0} [ ln(t)*e^(ln(t)*ε) / 1 ]
that is easy to calculate
= ln(t)*e^(ln(t)*0) / 1
= ln(t)*1 / 1
= ln(t)
So f(t)=ln(t)
So the type of the return value changes at asymptotes/limits (already) and thus that's not a pure function in terms of math. If a [math] function returns a more complex type signature instead of throwing a ZeroDivisionError (as Python core does) what is that then called? Is it differentiable or no, etc?
We throw ZeroDivisionError instead of axiomatically defining a ranking for
scalar*parameter*inf
if x > 0:
2*x*inf > x*inf
# because
2 > 1
Is negative infinity to the infinity greater or lesser than infinity?
assert (-1*math.inf)**math.inf == math.inf
assert (-1*sympy.oo)**sympy.oo == sympy.oo
from sympy import symbol
from sympy.abc import x
Infinity = symbol('Infinity', real=True) # *
#
from sympy.symbols import Wild
limit(-x**-1)
"[Python-ideas] Re: 'Infinity' constant in Python" https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.or...
> So the type of the return value changes at asymptotes/limits (already) and thus that's not a pure function in terms of math.
Plenty of functions are discontinuous. Almost all of them, in fact. (This isn't true constructively, but GP is clearly doing classical analysis.)
> If a [math] function returns a more complex type signature instead of throwing a ZeroDivisionError (as Python core does) what is that then called? Is it differentiable or no, etc?
Depends on the smooth structures you've imposed on the domain and codomain, which requires much more powerful types to represent than are available in any mainstream language I'm aware of. (You might be able to contort Haskell into something sort of close, but it wouldn't be simple.)
Show HN: Monocle – bidirectional code generation library
I just published a bidirectional code generation library. Afaik it's the first of its kind, and it opens up a lot of possibilities for cool new types of dev tools. The PoC is for ruby, but the concept is very portable. https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/monocle-bidirectional-code-gen...
Yeah back in the 90's it was called "round-tripping"
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/rhapsody/8.2?topic=developing-ro...
I did a lot of code generation work in those years, working on the two dominant Mac-based generators (AppMaker and Prototyper) but was never ambitious enough to try round-tripping because of the horrors of parsing C++.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-trip_engineering :
> Round-trip engineering (RTE) is a functionality of software development tools that synchronizes two or more related software artifacts, such as, source code, models, configuration files, and even documentation.[1] The need for round-trip engineering arises when the same information is present in multiple artifacts and therefore an inconsistency may occur if not all artifacts are consistently updated to reflect a given change. For example, some piece of information was added to/changed in only one artifact and, as a result, it became missing in/inconsistent with the other artifacts.
Source-to-source_compiler > See also > #ROSE, : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler
Organization Discussions – GitHub Changelog
"What is GitHub Discussions? A complete guide" https://resources.github.com/devops/process/planning/discuss...
> GitHub Discussions vs. GitHub Issues: When to use each: When and how to use Discussions and Issues on a project—and how to turn a Discussion into an Issue (and vice versa).
Looks like they also support Polls now. There should be an obligatory note about e-voting, private keys (SK/PK), ZK, and "master keys" in non- Zero Trust Systems . https://github.com/topics/e-voting
Zero-trust security model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_trust_security_model
"What’s new in GitHub Discussions: Organization Discussions, polls, and more" (2022-04) https://github.blog/2022-04-12-whats-new-in-github-discussio...
Unfortunately code can indeed generate code.
Fossil of dinosaur killed in asteroid strike found, scientists claim
The telling quote is:
"Dinosaurs: The Final Day with Sir David Attenborough will be broadcast on BBC One on 15 April at 18:30 BST. A version has been made for the US science series Nova on the PBS network to be broadcast later in the year."
say no more.
Over here that's PBS NOVA "Dinosaur Apocalypse: The Last Day" (2022) with Sir David Attenborough. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/dinosaur-apocalypse-the-...
It says "MAY 11, 2022 AT 10PM". Presumably that's EST or EDT.
This decent 25minute version will do until then. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChQHrjefVU] (Less a distinguished British accent. ;-> )
List of impact craters on Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (C-P or also K-Pg event) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e... :
> A wide range of species perished in the K–Pg extinction, the best-known being the non-avian dinosaurs. It also destroyed myriad other terrestrial organisms, including some mammals, birds,[21] lizards,[22] insects,[23][24] plants, and all the pterosaurs.[25] In the oceans, the K–Pg extinction killed off plesiosaurs and mosasaurs and devastated teleost fish,[26] sharks, mollusks (especially ammonites, which became extinct), and many species of plankton. It is estimated that 75% or more of all species on Earth vanished.[27] Yet the extinction also provided evolutionary opportunities: in its wake, many groups underwent remarkable adaptive radiation—sudden and prolific divergence into new forms and species within the disrupted and emptied ecological niches. Mammals in particular diversified in the Paleogene,[28] evolving new forms such as horses, whales, bats, and primates. The surviving group of dinosaurs were avians, ground and water fowl who radiated into all modern species of bird.[29] Teleost fish,[30] and perhaps lizards[22] also radiated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object :
> A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body whose orbit brings it into proximity with Earth. By convention, a Solar System body is a NEO if its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU).[2] If a NEO's orbit crosses the Earth's, and the object is larger than 140 meters (460 ft) across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO).[3] Most known PHOs and NEOs are asteroids, but a small fraction are comets. [1]
Asteroid impact avoidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance :
> In 2016, a NASA scientist warned that the Earth is unprepared for such an event.[3] In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported "It's 100 percent certain we'll be hit by a devastating asteroid, but we're not 100 percent sure when."[4] Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet. [5][6][7] Several ways of avoiding an asteroid impact have been described.[8] Nonetheless, in March 2019, scientists reported that asteroids may be much more difficult to destroy than thought earlier.[9][10] In addition, an asteroid may reassemble itself due to gravity after being disrupted.[11] In May 2021, NASA astronomers reported that 5 to 10 years of preparation may be needed to avoid a virtual impactor based on a simulated exercise conducted by the 2021 Planetary Defense Conference. [12][13][14]
- Nkalakatha the "#megamaser" (2022) https://www.sciencealert.com/extreme-megamaser-discovered-sh... ... (Can we harvest or collect and point - or pull against - such energy sources which are already present, using a minimum pertubative force in n-body idk QFT+QG fields in order to effectively read and write to points in stochastic spacetime, which is presumably all embedded in the horizon disc of one or more microscopic and larger black holes?)
Can a train of multiple solar collector + sails + lasers exceed (c + nlimit_approaching_c, or does that warp spacetime for NEOs, over their net effective path through spacetime?
- A QG Quantum Gravity duality for idk Gravitational lensing > Explanation in terms of spacetime curvature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
Claimed moons of Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claimed_moons_of_Earth
> Although the Moon is Earth's only natural satellite, there are a number of near-Earth objects (NEOs) with orbits that are in resonance with Earth. These have been called "second" moons of Earth. [3]*
> 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, an asteroid discovered on 27 April 2016, is possibly the most stable quasi-satellite of Earth.[4] As it orbits the Sun, 469219 Kamoʻoalewa appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be a true satellite of Earth, but is the best and most stable example of a quasi-satellite, a type of near-Earth object. They appear to orbit a point other than Earth itself, such as the orbital path of the NEO asteroid 3753 Cruithne. Earth trojans, such as 2010 TK7, are NEOs that orbit the Sun (not Earth) on the same orbital path as Earth, and appear to lead or follow Earth along the same orbital path.
> Other small natural objects in orbit around the Sun may enter orbit around Earth for a short amount of time, becoming temporary natural satellites. As of 2020, the only confirmed examples have been 2006 RH120 in Earth orbit during 2006 and 2007,[1] and 2020 CD3 in Earth orbit between 2018 and 2020. [5][6]
ʻOumuamua from ~Vega (2017)?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua
We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute
Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills (2020)
"GE produces world's largest recyclable wind turbine blade" (2022) https://newatlas.com/energy/ge-worlds-largest-recyclable-win...
> The 62-meter (203-ft) prototype blade is made with Elium resin from materials company Arkema, which is a glass-fiber reinforced thermoplastic. Not only is the material 100 percent recyclable, it is said to deliver a similar level of performance to thermoset resins that are favored for their lightweight and durability.
> Through a chemical recycling method, the material can be depolymerized and turned into a new resin for re-use, acting as a proof-of-concept for a circular economy loop for the wind energy sector. Before that happens, in the coming weeks LM Wind Power will start full-scale structural testing to verify the blade's performance
And for blades that aren’t recycled, they can be shredded into insulation pellets or feedstock for cement.
Why doesn't that work with existing thermosets?
Could these be feedstock for something like these formed LEGO-style hempcrete blocks with structure that are stronger and more insulating than structural concrete? https://youtu.be/eqLXXjvQXgI
Traditional composites are difficult to recycle because of several reasons: - the thermoset polymer matrix cannot be melted or separated from the fiber in any reasonable way - the thermoset resin cannot be reformed or reshaped into a useful shape or material - graphite fiber composites in particular are very, very hard on cutting tools and are difficult to chop up (not sure about glass fiber composites, but on bulk they have similar strength characteristics to some aluminums)
These properties are difficult to separate from composites because we want composite parts to survive the elements, often high temperatures, and be robust and reliable with little fatigue
What about waterjet?
Or e.g. SYLOS laser for transmutation?
Or replicating nanomachines?
Or a vat of something like the stuff that eats plastic and everything else in the ocean if it gets out?
Probably just orders of magnitude cheaper to just bury it somewhere
https://www.quora.com/How-many-wind-turbines-could-fit-in-1-... :
> The density of wind turbines per unit of land area depends on many factors. Wind farms containing very large (1.5–2 megaWatt) turbines may have only one for every 25–50 acres. Smaller turbines can be more closely spaced.
> At either rate, the overall harvestable wind energy per unit of land at fully rated conditions (approx. 12 meters/sec wind speed), is generally in the range of 50 to 100 kW per acre.
harvestable_wind_energy = 50-100 kW/acre
average_rotor_diameter: 120m (393ft)
blade_length = 1/2 * average_rotor_diameter = 60m (197m)
Acre = 43560 ft**2
blade_depth__on_end =
spacing_vertical =
spacing_horizontal =
Sphere packing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing
Wind_turbine_design#Blade_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design#Blade_recy...
In Python, [JupyterLite or Mamba] Pint and Uncertainties might be helpful for units and uncertainty/error propagation.
The https://numpy.org/ pyolite (WASM) IPython demo has SymPy installed in the env but not Pint?
GhostSCAD: Marrying OpenSCAD and Golang
I wonder how many OpenSCAD wrappers now exist? I know of scad-clj [0], openpyscad [1], and solidpython [2].
I particularly like scad-clj, because of `lein auto generate`. It watches source files, and regenerates the OpenSCAD files automatically, which OpenSCAD then also picks up. Although I'm not well versed in Clojure, and find debugging Clojure tricky, the workflow is just so good.
[0] https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj
you know the language is limited/poorly thought out when dozens of people re putting time into making tools that do nothing but wrap it in order to make it usable.
https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery :
> CadQuery is often compared to OpenSCAD. Like OpenSCAD, CadQuery is an open-source, script based, parametric model generator. However, CadQuery stands out in many ways and has several key advantages:
> The scripts use a standard programming language, Python, and thus can benefit from the associated infrastructure. This includes many standard libraries and IDEs.
> CadQuery's CAD kernel Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) is much more powerful than the CGAL used by OpenSCAD. Features supported natively by OCCT include NURBS, splines, surface sewing, STL repair, STEP import/export, and other complex operations, in addition to the standard CSG operations supported by CGAL
> Ability to import/export STEP and the ability to begin with a STEP model, created in a CAD package, and then add parametric features. This is possible in OpenSCAD using STL, but STL is a lossy format.
> CadQuery scripts require less code to create most objects, because it is possible to locate features based on the position of other features, workplanes, vertices, etc.
> CadQuery scripts can build STL, STEP, and AMF faster than OpenSCAD.
What are some of the advantages of OpenSCAD tooling?
The existence of true one-way functions depends on Kolmogorov complexity
Isn’t Kolmogorov Complexity hard to measure, because it depends on the language chosen?
The value of K for any language is within a constant of K for any other language. To convince yourself this is true, imagine constructing an interpreter for your preferred language in whatever language you are given. You can always prepend this (fixed-sized) interpreter to a program in your preferred language, adding a constant value to the complexity.
K can be arbitrarily large though.
I think the key is that K is fixed per language, not per input. So if you have a sequence of inputs of complexity 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000...in language L1, then in language L2, the complexities will be something like 1+K, 10+K, 100+K, 1000+K, 10000+K,.... In the limit of very-high-complexity-input (pick a random TB of data as your string) the language-specific constant is overwhelmed.
1+K, 10+K, ... are merely upper bounds on the Kolmogorov complexities in L2, but the actual complexities can be lower, by an arbitrary amount for some strings. Furthermore, what's considered complex in L1 and L2 can be very different, and although "most" strings would be complex in either language, they don't have to be the same subsets in L1 and L2.
What is the correlation between _ complexity and e.g. EVM/eWASM opcode [CPU,] costs?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28499001
> Smart contracts cost CPU usage with costed opcodes. eWASM (Ethereum WebAssembly) has costed opcodes for redundantly-executed smart contracts (that execute on n nodes of a shard) https://ewasm.readthedocs.io/en/mkdocs/determining_wasm_gas_...
> AFAIU, while there are DLTs that cost CPU, RAM, and Data storage between points in spacetime, none yet incentivize energy efficiency by varying costs depending upon whether the instructions execute on a FPGA, ASIC, CPU, GPU, TPU, or QPU?
Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity
Lifetime Annotations for C++
Looks like at least some of the authors are working for Google (if not everyone), with compiler backgrounds. I wonder if this is a strategical investment from Google to make cxx like approach more robust? Chrome team showed some interests on using Rust but not sure if there's any significant code written in Rust from then. Benefit from using Rust beside well isolated library might be quite limited without this kind of lifetime annotation while interop itself is additional cognitive overheads for programmers.
I think it makes the most sense for Google, considering the ridiculous amount of C++ code. Even Spanner alone is larger than most company's codebases, and rewriting it in Rust would take decades, especially because of the paradigm mismatch (C++ embraces shared mutability, Rust rejects it).
It also makes sense because in Spanner, doing any minor change required many months of review, because it was such critical infrastructure. Refactoring was a non-starter in a lot of cases.
So, a more gradual approach, just adding annotations that don't themselves affect the behavior of the program (just assist in static analysis) makes much more sense.
Rust does not reject shared mutability. Rather, it is explicitly reified via the Cell<>, RefCell<>, etc. patterns. Even unsafe shared mutability ala idiomatic C++ is just an UnsafeCell<> away.
In theory yes, but when you look at the average Rust program, those mechanisms are avoided in favor of more idiomatic approaches.
Interior mutability is used all over the place. It's absolutely necessary. The thing is you are forced to be clear about the runtime safety mechanism you're using. In general, it gets abstracted away behind a safe API.
Indeed it's present under the hood, we are operating on a CPU after all, which treats all of RAM as one giant shared-mutable blob of data. It will always be there, under some abstraction.
The point I'm trying to communicate is that in practice, for various reasons, Rust programs do not use shared mutable access to objects to the same extent that C++ programs do. For example, C++ programs use observers, and dependency injection (the pattern, not the framework) to have member pointers to mutable subsystems, and we just don't often see that in Rust programs. This is the paradigm mismatch I'm highlighting: to rewrite a C++ program in Rust often requires a large paradigm shift. The pain is particularly felt when making them interoperate in a gradual refactoring.
This is IMO one the bigger reasons that big rewrites to new languages fail, and why new languages benefit from being multi-paradigm, so that there's no paradigm mismatch to impede migrations.
IDK why the private, internal paradigms of e.g. Spanner would even need to be reimplemented in a clone instead of a port?
Looks like CockroachDB (Go), TiDB (Go, Rust), and YugabyteDB (C++) are Distributed SQL alternatives to Spanner.
... Which may or may not be able to rely upon inexpensive Lamport clocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp#Lamport's_lo...
From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-30603322 re https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/Database_index :
https://github.com/wilsonzlin/edgesearch :
> * Serverless full-text search with Cloudflare Workers, WebAssembly, and Roaring Bitmaps *
> "Edgesearch builds a reverse index by mapping terms to a compressed bit set (using Roaring Bitmaps) of IDs of documents containing the term, and creates a custom worker script and data to upload to Cloudflare Workers"
WASM or [C++] to WASM?
TIL about Roaring Bitmaps: /?q=roaring+bitmap https://medium.com/@amit.desai03/roaring-bitmaps-fast-data-s...
All those alternatives you mentioned are nowhere close to being on the level of Spanner in reliability or performance, particularly in a high contention scenario.
From https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lifetime-annotations-for-c/... :
> We are designing, implementing, and evaluating an attribute-based annotation scheme for C++ that describes object lifetime contracts. It allows relatively cheap, scalable, local static analysis to find many common cases of heap-use-after-free and stack-use-after-return bugs. It allows other static analysis algorithms to be less conservative in their modeling of the C++ object graph and potential mutations done to it. Lifetime annotations also enable better C++/Rust and C++/Swift interoperability.
> This annotation scheme is inspired by Rust lifetimes, but it is adapted to C++ so that it can be incrementally rolled out to existing C++ codebases. Furthermore, the annotations can be automatically added to an existing codebase by a tool that infers the annotations based on the current behavior of each function’s implementation.
> Clang has existing features for detecting lifetime bugs [...]
edit: Chrome evaluated previous [[clang::lifetimebound]], and that wasn't enough:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRZr-HJcYmf2Y76D...
Is this doc talking about the same feature that this post is about? It sounds like the doc is talking about a different, less-precise analysis that the post cites as prior art.
Learn about Concept Maps
I grew up hearing a lot of buzz for concept maps (or mind maps as I heard). I never found them to be as powerful as advertised.
A concept map is slightly easier than writing in bulletpoints because it can ignore structure. But this makes it incredibly difficult for anyone, including myself, to read after it is written.
At best, I use a concept map as an intermediary stage for figuring out how to write in bulletpoints, write in paragraphs, or draw in diagrams. This intermediary stage never lasts overnight for me, and I discard the concept map immediately.
("Mind maps are similar in structure to concept maps, developed by learning experts in the 1970s, but differ in that mind maps are simplified by focusing around a single central key concept."):
Perfect one sentence summary. I wasted a minute or two searching online for the difference between the two, but I should have read your comment first! Thanks for communicating precisely and concisely.
While scoping is necessary and useful, I hadn't ever learned that there were categorical restrictions upon mind map graphs, definitionally
Centrality, Components, Cliques might be helpful for general network analysis: https://networkx.org/documentation/stable/reference/algorith...
The difference between a URI and a URL; a URL is supposed to be dereferenceable and retrievable.
Named Graphs are composed of triples:
{named_graph_uri, subject_uri, predicate_uri, value_uri, [datatype_uri, language_uri]}
{g, s, p, o, [d, l]}
Though, general systems are more complex than the average [concept] network: there are nonlinearities in so many of the observed relations between components that trees and DAGs are laughably insufficient; systems descriptions require more than naievely-acyclical graphs without nonlinearity in independent relations even.
Graph (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph
Glossary of systems theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory
How best to describe nonlinear relations without a MultiDiGraph that bundles edges together by [QFT] field, because they're objectively not statistically independent?
s/value_uri/object/, which may be a URI:
{named_graph_uri, subject_uri, predicate_uri, object, [datatype_uri, language_uri]}
{g, s, p, o, [d], [l]}
@base <_#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix schema: <https://schema.org/> .
:Node, a, rdfs:Class .
:linksTo, a, rdfs:Property .
:Shapes, a, :Node .
:Shapes, :linksTo, :Rectangle .
:Rectangle, a, :Node .
:Rectangle, :linksTo, :Square .
:Square, a, :Node .
:Square, rdfs:label, "Square" .
:Square, schema:name, "Square" .
:Rectangle, rdfs:subClassOf, :Shape .
:Square, rdfs:subClassOf, :Rectangle .
The Personal Security Checklist
Also good: "The SaaS CTO Security Checklist [Redux]" https://github.com/vikrum/SecurityChecklists
"The Personal Infosec & Security Checklist" https://www.goldfiglabs.com/guide/personal-infosec-security-...
"The DevOps Security Checklist Redux" https://www.goldfiglabs.com/guide/devops-security-checklist/
... Years ago, I helped develop a checklist app for a hospital (in Python and JS at the time).
TIL checklists usually are justified, and may be the only process for collaboratively improving process controls that a healthy organization handling feedback has established; who gets to send PRs to the checklist, and what criteria should be applied such that evidence-based variations of process are objectively tested?
"Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684376
Study Tips from Richard Feynman
There's the famous Feynman method i.e. Study hard, Teach it to others, Identify the gaps in your own knowledge, and Simplify/Synthesize.
But people often also forget that there is another method associated with Feynman aka The Feynman Algorithm (which was outlined by his colleague Murray Gell-Mann, a noble prize winning physicist himself). This method goes as follows:
1. Write down the problem. 2. Think real hard. 3. Write the solution.
Not to discount or discredit anything (or anyone) here but we must understand that Feynman was no average person and that his advice on anything related to learning or problem-solving must be viewed through an optics that adequately adjusts for his intellect as well.
> Teach it to others
If there's no one around, try explaining it to yourself. An easy method to determine whether you superficially understood a topic or not. After reading some material, it's remarkable how little of it you've truly understood sometimes.
Minimodem – general-purpose software audio FSK modem
If you are interested in transmitting data over sound between airgapped devices, make sure to also checkout ggwave [0]. I've been working on this library on and off during the past year in my free time. I focused on making a FSK protocol that is robust in noisy environments at the cost of low bandwidth. Found some fun applications in various hobby projects.
Could this be used to embed e.g. the sports "game clock" clock time(s) in broadcast TV/audio/video streams; in order to synchronize an air-gapped device next to the media signal reproduction unit?
For example at a grille during the game.
FWIU, e.g. Chromecast have ultrasonic pairing.
Digital broadcasting adds significant latency so it would be in sync with the TV but still out of sync with the actual game (and other broadcast receivers).
The same issue affects radio time signal (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Time_Signal, last beep is the exact top of the hour), so some broadcasters will no longer play them on internet streams/digital radio, rather than be inaccurate.
So live TV could broadcast [ultrasonic] timecodes during ad breaks such that the gameclock would be synchronized even when the viewer initially tunes in during ad breaks, but "Video On Demand" would be fine because it's not the current time timecode, it would be a game time timecode?
Selecting between multiple audible [sports bar TVs, radios] might imply need for a sonewhat-unique signal code, or only over e.g. USB would work with more than one game on; because there's naturally noise in that airgap channel.
Yes absolutely! (Edit: or maybe not :-) see sibling comment for more info)
Actually, the "Waver" youtube video linked at the top of the README has an embedded ultrasound transmission at around 0:36. I can for example decode the message on my iPhone by simply running the Waver app and playing the video on my PC.
Some people have already done some work for AV sync in the issues of the project [0].
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3421 https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-i2s-mems-microphone-brea... :
> The I2S is a small, low-cost MEMS mic with a range of about 50Hz - 15KHz, good for just about all general audio recording/detection.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound :
> Ultrasound devices operate with frequencies from 20 kHz up to several gigahertz.
Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040), Pi Zero [2 W]: $5+
Power supply, case, wall-mount:
Mic: ~$6
Huge [red] 7-segment display with I2C and voltage regulator components taped to the wall next to the sports bar TVs:
Ask HN: Why don't PCs have better entropy sources?
After reading the thread "Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random" (1) I was wondering why PCs don't have a bunch of sensors available to draw entropy from.
Is this assumption correct, that adding a magnetometer, accelerometer, simple GPS, etc to a motherboard would improve its entropy gathering? Or is there a mathematical/cryptographical rule that makes the addition of such sensors useless?
Do smartphones have better entropy gathering abilities? It seems like phones would be able to seed a RNG based on input from a variety of sensors that would all be very different between even phones in the same room. Looking at a GPS Android app like Satstat (2) it feels like there's a huge amount of variability to draw from.
If such sensors would add better entropy, would it really cost that much to add them to PC motherboards?
----
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30848973
(2) https://mvglasow.gitlab.io/satstat/ & https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.vonglasow.michael.satsta...
I think it's worth repeating this:
While there are platforms with better and worse hardware sources of unpredictable bits, the problem with Linux /dev/random isn't so much a hardware issue, but rather a software one. The fundamental problem Linux tries to solve isn't that hard, as you can see from the fact that so many other popular platforms running on similar hardware have neatly solved it.
The problem with the LRNG is that it's been architecturally incoherent for a very long time (entropy estimation, urandom vs random, lack of clarity about seeding and initialization status, behavior doing bootup). As a result, an ecosystem of software has grown roots around the design (and bugs) of the current LRNG. Major changes to the behavior of the LRNG breaks "bug compatibility", and, because the LRNG is one of the core cryptographic facilities in the kernel, this is an instance where you really really don't want to break userland.
The basic fact of kernel random number generation is this: once you've properly seeded an RNG, your acute "entropy gathering" problem is over. Continuous access to high volumes of high-entropy bits are nice to have, but the kernel gains its ability to satisfy gigabytes of requests for random numbers from the same source that modern cryptography gains its ability to satisfy gigabytes of requests for ciphertext with a 128 bit key.
People looking to platform hardware (or who fixate on the intricacies of threading the LRNG isn't guest VMs) are mostly looking in the wrong place for problems to solve. The big issue today is that the LRNG is still pretty incoherent, but nobody really knows what would break if it was designed more carefully.
The piece I've been missing in this whole debate: why isn't the existing RNG simply frozen in its current bug-exact-behavior state and a new /dev/sane_random created?
Stuff that depends on the existing bugs in order to function can keep functioning. Everything else can move to something sane.
Obviously I'm missing something here.
> Obviously I'm missing something here
For a start, there's a long tail of migrating all useful software to /dev/sane_random. Moreover, there's a risk new software accidentally uses the old broken /dev/random.
Besides, /dev/sane_random essentially exists; it's just a sysctl called getrandom().
It's not that simple; Donenfeld wants to replace the whole LRNG with a new engine that uses simpler, more modern, and more secure/easier-to-analyze cryptography, and one of the roadblocks there is that swapping out the engine risks breaking bugs that userland relies on.
Postgres wire compatible SQLite proxy
Awesome to see work in the DB wire compatible space. On the MySQL side, there was MySQL Proxy (https://github.com/mysql/mysql-proxy), which was scriptable with Lua, with which you could create your own MySQL wire compatible connections. Unfortunately it appears to have been abandoned by Oracle and IIRC doesn't work with 5.7 and beyond. I used it in the past to hack together a MySQL wire adapter for Interana (https://scuba.io/).
I guess these days the best approach for connecting arbitrary data sources to existing drivers, at least for OLAP, is Apache Calcite (https://calcite.apache.org/). Unfortunately that feels a little more involved.
NYTimes/DBSlayer (2007) wraps MySQL in JSON: https://open.nytimes.com/introducing-dbslayer-64d7168a143f
ODBC > Bridging configurations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_Connectivity#Bri...
awesome-graphql > tools: security: https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-graphql#tools---securi...
... W3C SOLID > Authorization and Access Control: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec#authorization-and-access...
"Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages" (2021) re: sql.js-httpvfs, DuckDB https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28021766
[edit] TIL the MS ODBC 4.0 spec is MIT Licensed, on GitHub , and supports ~challenge/response token auth: "3.2.2 Web-based Authentication Flow with SQLBrowseConnect" https://github.com/microsoft/ODBC-Specification/blob/master/...
> Applications that are unable to allow drivers to pop up dialogs can call SQLBrowseConnect to connect to the service.
> SQLBrowseConnect provides an iterative dialog between the driver and the application where the application passes in an initial input connection string. If the connection string contains sufficient information to connect, the driver responds with SQL_SUCCESS and an output connection string containing the complete set of connection attributes used.
> If the initial input connection string does not contain sufficient information to connect to the source, the driver responds with SQL_NEED_DATA and an output connection string specifying informational attributes for the application (such as the authorization url) as well as required attributes to be specified in a subsequent call to SQLBrowseConnect. Attribute names returned by SQLBrowseConnect may include a colon followed by a localized identifier, and the value of the requested attribute is either a single question mark or a comma-separated list of valid values (optionally including localized identifiers) enclosed in curly braces. Optional attributes are returned preceded with an asterix (*).
> In a Web-based authentication scenario, if SQLBrowseConnect is called with an input connection string containing an access token that has not expired, along with any other required properties, no additional information should be required. If the access token has expired and the connection string contains a refresh token, the driver attempts to refresh the connection using the supplied refresh token.
Also TIL ODBC 4.0 supports: https://github.com/microsoft/ODBC-Specification :
> Semi-structured data – Tables whose schema may not be defined or may change on a row-by-row basis
> Hierarchical Data – Data with nested structure (structured fields, lists)
> Web Authentication model
Show HN: Redo – Command line utility for quickly creating shell functions
Currently, I'll append a comment to a frequently used command for easy searching from my history. For a simple example, I can access `git diff -w ; git diff -w --cached # gitdiff` by pressing Ctrl+R and typing `# gitd`.
For commands I use frequently or that are clunky to maintain as one-liners, I'll convert them into functions in my bashrc.
This seems like the best of both worlds in many ways, or at least is a great third option to have.
From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-20671184 ::
> I log shell commands with a script called usrlog.sh that creates [per-]$USER and per-virtualenv tab-delimited [$_USRLOG] logfiles with unique per-terminal-session identifiers [$_TERM_ID] and ISO8601 timestamps; so it's really easy to just grep for the apt/yum/dnf commands that I ran ad-hoc when I should've just taken a second to create an Ansible role with `ansible-galaxy init ansible-role-name ` and referenced that in a consolidated system playbook with a `when` clause. https://westurner.github.io/dotfiles/usrlog.html#usrlog
stid \#tutorial; echo "$_TERM_ID"
tail -n11 $_USRLOG
ut -n11
grep "$_TERM_ID" "$_USRLOG"
usrlog_grep "$_TERM_ID"
ug "$_TERM_ID"
usrlog_grep_parse "$_TERM_ID"
ugp "$_TERM_ID" # `type ugp`
Rustc_codegen_GCC can now bootstrap rustc
It's really great to be able to skip compiling LLVM when bootstrapping a whole OS/toolchain from source and only Rust happens to pull LLVM in.
Besides the gcc work I'm actually also hoping for the rustc_codegen_cranelift work to land one day!
Compiling llvm is a nightmare
Compiling LLVM for what purpose? Hacking on it? Producing an optimized build? Installing a build on a user's machine? You should be more specific.
The default clean build works just fine. On my machine I can clone the Git repo, do `mkdir build && cmake ../llvm && make -j64` and end up with working binaries after 5 minutes.
The build take 37GB by default here, and the binaries under bin/ are immediately usable work. If you want a smaller build with shared library just add a parameter. Want to throw in sub-projects such as LLD or Clang? Just another parameter. It's all very well-documented.
64 cores, and it takes 5 minutes? That’s… not awesome. Most people do not have 64 (presumably high performance) cores lying around for the purpose of building dependencies.
10 minutes of a c6i.32xlarge costs less than a dollar at on-demand rates in the us-east-2 AWS region. That'll get you 128 vCPUs and 256 gb of memory.
I think people put up with a lot of stuff that there's no reason to any more with on-demand computing.
Q: "Does my data fit in RAM?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22309883
A: https://yourdatafitsinram.net
Is there a one-liner to build llvm e.g. with k8s and containers, or just a `git push` to a PR? #GitOps
And another to publish a locally-signed tagged build?
`conda install rust` does install `cargo`.
`conda install -c conda-forge -y mamba; mamba install -y rust libllvm14 lit llvm llvm-tools llvmdev`
conda-forge/llvmdev-feedstock; ninja, cmake, python >= 3 https://github.com/conda-forge/llvmdev-feedstock/blob/main/r...
.scripts/run_docker_build.sh is called by build-locally.py: https://github.com/conda-forge/llvmdev-feedstock/blob/main/....
Black Holes Shown to Act Like Quantum Particles
Wouldn’t a singularity be the smallest point possible? By definition it is pretty much a cyclone of the smallest units of space time fabric. Any particle would need to exist above this scale in order to exist within the construct of the universe. If there were any object smaller than this it would mean that whatever makes up a unit/point/pixel of space time fabric is actually an emergent construct of much smaller units. If there were smaller said units composing even space time itself, perhaps these would be or be composed by a finally irreducibly small unit, the properties of which give rise to all variations of matter/energy, the laws which govern them and their equality and convertablity according to special relativity.
Most scientists do not think that black holes have a "real singularity." The idea of a mass that occupies a single point in space comes from taking Einstein's equations beyond the event horizon, ie. the curvature of space is greater than light so means nothing can have any resistance to distance/size. At some point between the event horizon and the center, quantum gravity (which is not understood) has to come into the picture. One idea is the "black hole firewall," which is that mass gets "stuck" at the boundary of the black hole.
White hole > Big Bang/Supermassive White Hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole :
> Some researchers have proposed that when a black hole forms, a Big Bang may occur at the core/singularity, which would create a new universe that expands outside of the parent universe
Where's the exit on this thing?
Do the CMB or GWB indicate that the Shapley Attractor / Great Attractor interaction is the omnidirectional mouth / center of it all, or no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster
Gravitational wave background > Cosmological sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave_background
... FWIU, all we've done is observe minute confirmatory fluctuations from the ground; e.g. LIGO (Nobel Prize in Physics 2017, Thorne, NumFocus-supported tools)? Could that tell us where the center is? Should there even be one if we're actually inside a white hole / black hole combo?
What "dark matter" do we subtract or add to the CMB, GWB,?
... Severe questions of cosmological topology, in regards to a manifold for holographic projection
@PBSSpaceTime videos:
"Where Is The Center of The Universe?" (2022) https://youtu.be/BOLHtIWLkHg
"Could The Universe Be Inside A Black Hole?" (2022) https://youtu.be/jeRgFqbBM5E
"The Holographic Universe Explained" (2019) https://youtu.be/klpDHn8viX8
"Are Black Holes Actually Fuzzballs?" (2022) https://youtu.be/351JCOvKcYw
From https://www.quantamagazine.org/massive-black-holes-shown-to-... :
> Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.
"Scale invariance in quantum field theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance#Scale_invaria...
Dagger: a new way to build CI/CD pipelines
Hi everyone, I'm one of the co-founders of Dagger (and before that founder of Docker). This is a big day for us, it's our first time sharing something new since, you know... Docker.
If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them here!
Hi! I've browsed the docs quickly, and I have a few questions.
Seems to assume that all CI/CD workflows work in a single container at a time pattern. How about testing when I need to spin up an associated database container for my e2e tests. Is it possible, and just omitted from the documentation?
Not familiar with cue, but can I import/define a common action that is used across multiple jobs? For example on GitHub I get to duplicate the dependency installation/caching/build across various jobs. (yes, I'm aware that now you can makeshift on GitHub a composite action to reuse)
Can you do conditional execution of actions based on passed in input value/env variable?
Any public roadmap of upcoming features?
> Seems to assume that all CI/CD workflows work in a single container at a time pattern.
Dagger runs your workflows as a DAG, where each node is an action running in its own container. The dependency graph is detected automatically, and all containers that can be parallelized (based on their dependencies) will be parallelized. If you specify 10 actions to run, and they don't depend on each other, they will all run in parallel.
> How about testing when I need to spin up an associated database container for my e2e tests. Is it possible, and just omitted from the documentation?
It is possible, but not yet convenient (you need to connect to an external docker engine, via a docker CLI wrapped in a container) We are working on a more pleasant API that will support long-running containers (like your test DB) and more advanced synchronization primitives (wait for an action; terminate; etc.)
This is discussed in the following issues:
- https://github.com/dagger/dagger/issues/1337
- https://github.com/dagger/dagger/issues/1249
- https://github.com/dagger/dagger/issues/1248
> Not familiar with cue, but can I import/define a common action that is used across multiple jobs?
Yes! That is one of the most important features. CUE has a complete packaging system, and we support it natively.
For example here is our "standard library" of CUE packages: https://github.com/dagger/dagger/tree/main/pkg
> For example on GitHub I get to duplicate the dependency installation/caching/build across various jobs. (yes, I'm aware that now you can makeshift on GitHub a composite action to reuse)
Yes code reuse across projects is where Dagger really shines, thanks to CUE + the portable nature of the buildkit API.
Note: you won't need to configure caching though, because Dagger automatically caches all actions out of the box :)
> Can you do conditional execution of actions based on passed in input value/env variable?
Yes, that is supported.
> Any public roadmap of upcoming features?
For now we rely on raw Github issues, with some labels for crude prioritization. But we started using the new Github projects beta (which is a layer over issues), and plan to open that to the community as well.
Generally, we develop Dagger in the open. Even as a team, we use public Discord channels (text and voice) by default, unless there is a specific reason not to (confidential information, etc.)
Thank you for the detailed response. I appreciate you taking the time. One last question/note.
> Note: you won't need to configure caching though, because Dagger automatically caches all actions out of the box :)
Is this strictly because it's using Docker underneath and layers can be reused? If so, unless those intermediary layers are somehow pushed/pulled by the dagger github action (or any associated CI/CD tool equivalent), experience on hosting server is going to be slow.
Sidenote, around 2013 I've worked on a hacky custom container automation workflow within Jenkins for ~100 projects, and spent considerable effort in setting up policies to prune intermediary images.
Thus on certain types of workflows without any prunning a local development machine can be polluted with hundreds of images, unless the user is specifically made aware of stale images. Does/will dagger keep track of the images it builds? I think a command like git gc could make sense.
> > Note: you won't need to configure caching though, because Dagger automatically caches all actions out of the box :)
> Is this strictly because it's using Docker underneath and layers can be reused?
Not exactly: we use Buildkit under the hood, not Docker. When you run a Dagger action, it is compiled to a DAG, and run by buildkit. Each node in the DAG has content-addressed inputs. If the same node has been executed with the same inputs, buildkit will cache it. This is the same mechanism that powers caching in "docker build", but generalized to any operation.
The buildkit cache does need to be persisted between runs for this to work. It supports a variety of storage backends, including posix filesystem, a docker registry, or even proprietary key-value services like the Github storage API. If buildkit supports it, Dagger supports it.
Don't let the "docker registry" option confuse you: buildkit cache data isn't the same as docker images, so it doesn't carry the same garbage collection and tag pruning problems.
> Don't let the "docker registry" option confuse you: buildkit cache data isn't the same as docker images, so it doesn't carry the same garbage collection and tag pruning problems.
IIRC doesn't buildkit store its cache data as fake layer blobs + manifest?
I don't see how it can avoid the garbage collection and tag pruning problems since those are limitations of the registry implementation itself.
You still need to manage the size of your cache, since in theory it can grow infinitely. But it’s a different problem than managing regular Docker images, because there are no named references to worry about: just blobs that may or may not be reused in the future. The penalty for removing the “wrong” blob is a possible cache miss, not a broken image.
Dagger currently doesn’t help you remove blobs from your cache, but if/when it does, it will work the same way regardless of where the blobs are stored (except for the blob storage driver).
Is there a task runtime stat for a blob pruning task?
This sounds like memoization caching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization
> In computing, memoization or memoisation is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again.
Re: SBOM: Software Bill of Materials, OSV (CloudFuzz), CycloneDX, LinkedData, ld-proofs, sigstore, and software supply chain security: "Podman can transfer container images without a registry" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30681387
Can Dagger cache the (layer/task-merged) SBOM for all of the {CodeMeta, SEON OWL} schema.org/Thing s?
Grafana Mimir – Horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus
There isn't a link to the project on the page (that I could find) so it almost looked like it's not open source. But here it is: https://github.com/grafana/mimir.
You have to find the "Download" button and click it, it's very non-obvious :< The entire page seems to be designed to funnel you into signing up for their paid service, which makes sense, but still doesn't feel great...
Recently switched from their cloud service back to on-premise. The cloud version wasn't being updated and the entire setup experience left a lot to be desired with how you connect their on-premise grafana agent, especially if you aren't using their easy button deployment stuff. Also, billing for metrics is insane, as on any given day my metric load may vary between 5-7k or more. This caused some operational overhead as I was constantly tweaking scrapers to reduce useless metrics.
For $50/mo, you can self host everything easier, cheaper and with more control IMO.
> For $50/mo, you can self host everything easier, cheaper and with more control IMO.
Can you give an example as to how you could self host a grafana stack for $50/month? On AWS that buys you 4 cores, 8GB memory and 0 storage, and it's certainly not easier than clicking one button on the grafana website.
There are Helm charts available for all Grafana products so if you already run a Kubernetes cluster and have spare capacity you can just throw it up there. Loki supports shipping logs to GCS/S3 natively and Prometheus can use Cortex (also available as a Helm chart) to do the same. Once you throw Grafana behind SSO and implement a backup cronjob you're done until you reach scale and have to start deploying/scaling individual components separately.
I implemented most of the above using Terraform on a managed DigitalOcean cluster on a Saturday a few months back; it wasn't super-hard. Alternatively you could rent a few VPSes someplace and use k3s or similar to get an unmanaged cluster.
Physicists Build Circuit That Generates Clean, Limitless Power from Graphene (2020)
It's been two years, what is their progress? It has probably failed to be exploitable then ?
ScholarlyArticles that cite "Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene" (2020) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3748350803951231734...
Recommendations when publishing a WASM library
conda: "Adding a WebAssembly platform" https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7619
pyodide.loadPackage("numpy");
pyodide.loadPackage("https://foo/bar/numpy.js");
# import micropip
micropip.install('https://example.com/files/snowballstemmer-2.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl')
conda-forge: "WASM as a supported architecture" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...
A statically typed scripting language that transpiles to Posix sh
If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong (2019)
Rant engaged. As a person who feels responsible for ensuring what I build is secure, the security space feels inscrutably defeating. Is there a dummies guide, MOOC, cert, or other instructional material to better get a handle on all these things?
SSH keys make sense. But certificates? Is this OIDC, SAML, what? Is it unreasonable to request better and deeper "how to do {new security thing}" when PKI is a new acronym to someone? Where can I point my data science managers so they can understand the need and how to implement measures to have security on PII-laden dashboards? As so on.
I can surely recommend reading into SSH certificates using the ssh-keygen manpage. No any extra tools required.
I sign SSH certificates for all my keypairs on my client devices, principal is set to my unix username, expiry is some weeks or months.
The servers have my CA set via TrustedUserCAKeys in sshd_config (see manpages). SSH into root is forbidden per default, i SSH into an account with my principal name and then sudo or doas.
My gain in all of this: I have n clients and m servers. Instead of having to maintain all keys for all clients on all servers, i now only need to maintain the certificate on each client individually. If i loose or forget a client, its certificate runs out and becomes invalidated.
`ssh-keygen` #Certificates: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ssh-keygen.1.html#CERT...
"DevSec SSH Baseline" ssh_spec.rb, sshd_spec.rb https://github.com/dev-sec/ssh-baseline/blob/master/controls...
"SLIP-0039: Shamir's Secret-Sharing for Mnemonic Codes" https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.m...
> Shamir's secret-sharing provides a better mechanism for backing up secrets by distributing custodianship among a number of trusted parties in a manner that can prevent loss even if one or a few of those parties become compromised.
> However, the lack of SSS standardization to date presents a risk of being unable to perform secret recovery in the future should the tooling change. Therefore, we propose standardizing SSS so that SLIP-0039 compatible implementations will be interoperable.
Google's Certificate Transparency Search page to be discontinued May 15th, 2022
I know there are CT search services like crt.sh, but is it practical to download the raw data and search it locally? If the logs are append‐only, it feels like a perfect usecase for rsync.
Yes, you can use the certificate-transparency go code to pull down from the trillian API https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency-go/blob/m...
You would need to know the index, or you could just iterate over a range
Do you think that CT log data replication would be more secure and efficient if the CT logs were stored by a zero trust distributed application like a blockchain, instead of Merkle signatures in a database owned by one party (that's now discontinuing free indexing, at least)?
From "Oak, a Free and Open Certificate Transparency Log" (LetsEncrypt 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19920002 :
> Trillian is a centralized Merkle tree: it doesn't support native replication [...] According to the trillian README, trillian depends upon MySQL/MariaDB and thus internal/private replication is as good as the SQL replication model (which doesn't have a distributed consensus algorithm like e.g. paxos).
And what about indexing and search queries at volume, again without replication?
From "A future for SQL on the web" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28158491 :
> https://thegraph.com/docs/indexing
>> Indexers are node operators in The Graph Network that stake Graph Tokens (GRT) in order to provide indexing and query processing services. Indexers earn query fees and indexing rewards for their services. They also earn from a Rebate Pool that is shared with all network contributors proportional to their work, following the Cobbs-Douglas Rebate Function.
>> GRT that is staked in the protocol is subject to a thawing period and can be slashed if Indexers are malicious and serve incorrect data to applications or if they index incorrectly. Indexers can also be delegated stake from Delegators, to contribute to the network.
>> Indexers select subgraphs to index based on the subgraph’s curation signal, where Curators stake GRT in order to indicate which subgraphs are high-quality and should be prioritized. Consumers (eg. applications) can also set parameters for which Indexers process queries for their subgraphs and set preferences for query fee pricing.
FWIW, here's how OSV affords search queries: https://github.com/google/osv#data-dumps
> For convenience, these sources are aggregated and continuously exported to a GCS bucket maintained by OSV: gs://osv-vulnerabilities
> This bucket contains individual entries of the format gs://osv-vulnerabilities/<ECOSYSTEM>/<ID>.json as well as a zip containing all vulnerabilities for each ecosystem at gs://osv-vulnerabilities/<ECOSYSTEM>/all.zip
> E.g. for PyPI vulnerabilities:
# Or download over HTTP via https://osv-vulnerabilities.storage.googleapis.com/PyPI/all.zip
gsutil cp gs://osv-vulnerabilities/PyPI/all.zip
Implementing a toy version of TLS 1.3
This is wonderful.
I was super excited to dive in an find the RSA code so I could preen about Bleichenbacher's vulnerability, but she neatly sidestepped that by doing ECDH. Then I thought, well, maybe it's P-curve ECDH and I can preen about invalid curve attacks on static-ephemeral ECDH. But nope, X25519! My point here, apart from making fun of myself for being the kind of person who would write this stuff on a message board, is TLS 1.3 is pretty solid.
The "block thing" that's kind of weird is, I assume, the TLS Record Layer. TLS runs (ordinarily) over TCP, which provides a non-demarcated stream of bytes. TLS breaks that stream up into records, and runs its handshake messages over one type of record, (say) HTTPS over another, and "alerts" over a third. The Record Layer also interacts, I think, with TLS's misbegotten compression system?
In the same vein as this project (but with different goals) is Trevor Perrin's tlslite, which is implemented in pure Python: https://github.com/trevp/tlslite
> tlslite
"PEP 543 – A Unified TLS API for Python" #interfaces (-2016) https://peps.python.org/pep-0543/#interfaces
Learning a protocol by writing a toy client (or toy server) is a blast. It's so satisfying to see a real, production-quality server sending real responses to your little mess.
You'd probably enjoy work as a software pentester, where the docket --- at least for non-web-applications, which admittedly are the most common project if you don't specialize --- is almost entirely building tooling-grade implementations of random protocols so you can test for vulnerabilities.
Here's caddy's go/tls wrapper with e.g. ACME, OCSP stapling: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/blob/master/modules/cad...
Django-ca also does OCSP and certbot-compatible ACMEv2 w/ known limitations: https://django-ca.readthedocs.io/en/latest/acme.html#known-l...
E.g. https://google.github.io/clusterfuzzlite/ is likely not so great at protocols because that requires testing concurrent and distributed systems and TLAplus, which at least currently can't find side channels FWIU.
https://github.com/secfigo/Awesome-Fuzzing#network-protocol-...
OSS-Fuzz runs CloudFuzz[Lite?] for many open source repos and feeds OSV OpenSSF Vulnerability Format: https://github.com/google/osv#current-data-sources
The quantum technology ecosystem explained
Wikipedia (dbpedia, wikidata,) concept URIs:
Category:Quantum mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Quantum_mechanics
Applications_of_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_quantum_mechan...
List of emerging technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies may have inspiration for applications of currently-discovered quantum mechanical phenomena.
#Q12 is the Quantum K12 talent.
QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon may very well scale; but how can we store un-collapsed output qubits?
Quantum tagging,
> QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon may very well scale; but how can we store un-collapsed output qubits?
Aren't all current programmable quantum processors essentially made of qubit memory cells capable of certain in-memory operations?
All current programmable quantum processors are made from unicorn hairs and fairy dust.
The current state of the art is trying to prove that the thing did something quantum. Programmability is at best swapping some wires around to change that something.
This is false. Quantum computers are not programmed like telephone switch boards. They're programmed typically by sending signal pulses (of RF, DC, or light) of the right shape at the right time to physical elements and they react. It really is programming.
Moreover, it's remarkably easy to see that the machines—universal gate-based machines—are doing something quantum. What's not easy to see is if they'll ever break away from their scaling challenges and become useful, large scale machines.
Well, NMR has been doing that for quite some time but nobody considers it "computing". Realistically, you're encoding a problem within a physical system by perturbing its energy levels, letting them evolve, and then doing readout. This works because computation is universal.
Again, no. Maybe you're thinking about adiabatic quantum computation, something popularized by D-Wave. But most people in the industry don't call their machines "(universal) computers," but rather "quantum annealers."
This is not the same as universal, gate-based computation, which does take an actual program containing instructions, and executes those instructions more-or-less sequentially, just as any computer programmer would expect. The state of the system begins with what is essentially equivalent to a large array of 0's, and you manipulate it accordingly, without resorting to evolution as your primary computational means of marching forward. In fact, left alone, these computers are designed to remain static, like an ordinary computer. (However, they still couple with the environment and decohere, which is one of the major challenges we, as humanity, face in building a useful quantum computer.) This is what Rigetti, IBM, Google, HRL, Amazon, IonQ, ColdQuanta, etc. are doing. They use superconducting transmon qubits, ion qubits, neutral atom qubits, or silicon quantum dot qubits. (There are other companies and qubit technologies still.)
Hey, um, I think I do know what I'm talking about :). You can see more of this historical side effort, which didn't pan out for a number of reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_qua... A 7 qubit QC NMR was implemented in 2001.
All these systems are just evolution of spin systems or other similar systems. The big difference with an NMR quantum computer is that it manipulates ensembles of spins.
The comment about universality of computing is that many physical processes can be used to compute things. I didn't say that qcs were universal computers.
Please try to read what i'm writing more carefully.
I know what NMR is. The systems are not evolutions of NMR. They're fundamentally different in their design, construction, and physics. An exchange-only silicon dot quantum computer is very different than an NMR quantum computer, which is very different than a neutral atom quantum computer.
These computers, these days, are by and large considered computers which execute programs. Perhaps in the 90s-00s that wasn't the case since physicists cared more then about the construction of a laboratory apparatus and less about turning it into a programmable device with program and data I/O.
I can't comment on what you know or don't know, but what you're writing is misleading and not accurate. The two points you've made (about what's considered computing and how modern quantum computers work) are what I refute.
I don't understand your point. Everything I said above is completely and totally technically correct from a physical point of view. You are ascribing to my statements meaning which I did not intend.
Modern trapped ion computers are doing the same underlying operations as NMR: you are using RF or other energy to perturb the energy states of underlying particles or other components, and reading out the results.
There was also a whole field called 'dna computing' which you would call biologists in a lab, but they were absolutely doing computing
I'm intently curious what sort of common-sense explanation you'd ascribe to how one programs an ordinary classical computer. Would you describe a computer programmer as one who orchestrates a delicate movement of charge through an intricate arrangement of n–p–n bipolar transistors?
Quantum computers really can be instructed to do an abstract operation on an abstract quantity, just like I can on an ordinary computer. You tell quantum computers to add and multiply, just as you do in your favorite programming language. In the programming language Quil, which a couple quantum computers of different base technologies use, one can literally write down a matrix of numbers in a program to define a new mathematical function, and later use that function to manipulate the contents of the computer's RAM[1]. On top of this, you can have loops, boolean conditions, and all that jazz a programmer expects. You don't even need a physicist to do this; a completely physics-ignorant programmer could do this.
All this business about energy levels, evolution, etc. are distractions, just as the electrodynamics of a transistor are distractions from what it means to program a computer.
[1] I'm abusing the word "RAM" here, where I truly mean the state of your quantum register(s).
> one can literally write down a matrix of numbers in a program to define a new mathematical function, and later use that function to manipulate the contents of the computer's RAM[1].
This "Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists" video https://youtu.be/F_Riqjdh2oM explains classical and quantum operators as just matrices. What are other good references?
Quantum state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_state
Quantum logic; quantum logical operators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic
> All this business about energy levels, evolution, etc. are distractions, just as the electrodynamics of a transistor are distractions from what it means to program a computer.
But a classical simulator - like e.g. qiskit - for a quantum circuit/experiment/function must run the experiment very^very^very many times to even probabilistically approximate a sufficient quantum system; because of the combinatorial probabilistic explosion that results from adding just one more basis state.
What are the fundamental limitations of quantum simulators? Maybe it's possible.
Quantum simulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_simulator
- [ ] Maybe Twistor theory has insight into a classical geometrical formulation that could be run on a non-QC?
Amplituhedron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron
[Photon] wave-particle constructive superpositions approximate which operators, which may form a neat topology like this:
- [ ] > A research question for a new school year:
> The classical logical operators form a neat topology. Should we expect there to be such symmetry and structure amongst the quantum operators as well? https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logical_connective...
Your assessment of how a quantum simulator works is not quite right. These simulators represent the entire probability distribution of basis states succinctly as an array. This array grows very large (exponentially) in the number of qubits.
A simulator only needs to run a computation once (which is multiplication of matrices in a tensor product space) and look at the resulting state. You don't need to run anything multiple times to approximate a quantum state.
The questions you're asking are the whole point of the field of quantum information science. On an ordinary quantum computer where quantum state will collapse to a basis state upon readout, indeed you might need to gather statistics to determine the answer to whatever you've asked your computer. However, "very many times" is mathematically bounded in some way for an ideal quantum computer. It's like saying "we need to do many^many^many^many comparisons to do quicksort". Well yes, but we have a relationship between the size of the input (N) and the average number of comparisons needed (N log N), which makes the algorithm feasible in practice. This is the same with quantum algorithms.
There are also different kinds of quantum algorithms. Some are more probabilistic in nature. Others are—again in purely ideal circumstances—give you the right answer in one go.
As a side note: It is very hard for me to read, understand, and respond to your comments. They seem like random buzzword soups and aren't very coherently put together, mixed with random links and references.
Re: error in simulators and actual QC hardware, which we do need for a reason: Quantum Error Correction # General_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction#Gener...
How to best quantize reals into matrices (~= tensors)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(signal_processin...
> Peter Shor first discovered this method of formulating a quantum error correcting code by storing the information of one qubit onto a highly entangled state of nine qubits. A quantum error correcting code protects quantum information against errors of a limited form.
Here's "Quantum Algorithm Zoo" by Microsoft Quantum: https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
And "Timeline of quantum computing and communication" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing_...
I have a hard time with the idea that the outcome of the ultimate quantum simulation is a collapsed float.
Quantum Monte Carlo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Monte_Carlo :
> Quantum Monte Carlo encompasses a large family of computational methods whose common aim is the study of complex quantum systems. One of the major goals of these approaches is to provide a reliable solution (or an accurate approximation) of the quantum many-body problem. [...] The difficulty is however that solving the Schrödinger equation requires the knowledge of the many-body wave function in the many-body Hilbert space, which typically has an exponentially large size in the number of particles. Its solution for a reasonably large number of particles is therefore typically impossible,
What sorts of independent states can or should we map onto error-corrected qubits in an approximating system?
Propagation of Uncertainty ... Numerical stability ... Chaotic convergence, ultimately, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty
"Quantum computing: A taxonomy, systematic review and future" (2022) https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3039
"Multi-qubit quantum logic operations with ion-implanted donor spins in silicon" (2022) https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h... https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR22/Session/G39.1 (Veritasium video)
> Among semiconductor qubits, the electron and nuclear spins of donors in silicon play a special role for their conceptual simplicity (a 31P donor in silicon is similar to hydrogen in vacuum) and their exceptional coherence times [1] and 1-qubit gate fidelities [2]. Here I will present experimental progress on multi-qubit logic operations with donor spins, which point to several credible pathways for scalability using ion-implanted donors in MOS-compatible devices. The current state of the art is a hybrid electron-nuclear 3-qubit processor [3], where two 31P nuclear spin qubits are coupled to the same electron. The shared electron enables a geometric nuclear two-qubit CZ gate, which we perform with 99.37% average fidelity. NMR single-qubit gates reach fidelities up to 99.95%, and state preparation and measurement are performed with 98.95% fidelity. These three metrics show how close this system is to operating at fault-tolerance thresholds. Further, we entangle the two nuclei with the electron to prepare a 3-qubit GHZ state with 92.5% fidelity. Electron-nuclear entanglement unlocks the ability to connect nuclear qubits via the electrons, for instance using exchange interactions [4]. We have operated a weakly (~10 MHz) exchange-coupled 31P donor pair as a 2-qubit electron system, with native CROT gates performed by resonant microwaves. Gate fidelity benchmarks are underway and will be reported at the Meeting. On the engineering side, we have demonstrated the ability to implant single donors in silicon with confidence up to 99.85% [5]. This striking result identifies ion implantation as a scalable and accurate manufacturing strategy for spin-based quantum computers in silicon.
QoS: Quantum-on-Silicon
The survey article above just says "[Quantum] Output"? Is that different from registers? How long are those states ah coherent?
"Researchers store a quantum bit for a record-breaking 20 milliseconds" (2022) https://phys.org/news/2022-03-quantum-bit-fora-record-breaki...
> By managing to store a qubit in a crystal (a "memory") for 20 milliseconds, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has set a world record and taken a major step towards the development of long-distance quantum telecommunications networks.
What are repeaters, and what are [quantum] prepared states in re: registers and longer-term storage for non-collapsed (or just probabilistic?) qubit outputs?
Programming current quantum computers does not require swapping wires around. You can go to https://quantum-computing.ibm.com right now, drag some operations around in an editor, and have their quantum computer run those operations. No one is madly dashing around changing wires when you do that.
That was how they did it back in the old days though.
Q: "Ask HN: What's the Equivalent of 'Hello, World' for a Quantum Computer?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707580 [ IBM Qiskit, Microsoft Q#, Google TFQ TensorFlow Quantum, Google Cirq ([NumFOCUS,] SymPy) ]
- https://www.tensorflow.org/quantum/tutorials/hello_many_worl...
A: Set a register to zero and see how many times it reads as zero: A) in the local software simulator; and B) with just one modern day qubit register.
Debugging with GDB
One absolutely essential companion to gdb is 'rr' [0], it's a 'post mortem' debugger, but unlike a core file, you can replay the action, in reverse if necessary. You can reverse-cont, reverse-step create watchpoints, run forward again etc etc. It's absolutely amazing!
The best thing about time travel debugging is that you effectively get an instruction-perfect reproducer for the problem you're looking at.
Even if the problem only occurs one time in a thousand, if you have recorded it then you can review it in arbitrary detail as many times as you need. You can even send the recording to another developer for their feedback.
Probably the second best thing about time travel is watchpoints[0] + reverse-continue[1] - combining these two features, you can answer "why is that value there?" incredibly quickly.
Reverse execution + watchpoints is so powerful it can speed up the diagnosis of memory corruptions, race conditions, algorithmic bugs, etc from days/weeks to hours.
[0] https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Set-Watchpoints.ht...
[1] https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Reverse-Execution.... - GDB has an implementation of reverse debugging but larger projects like `rr` (https://rr-project.org/) or `udb` (https://undo.io/solutions/products/udb/ - which, disclaimer, I work on) exist to do this with higher performance on complex, real-world programs.
(edit: format links better)
Time travel debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel_debugging :
> Interactive debuggers include the ability to modify code and step forward based on updated information.[4] Reverse debugging tools allow users to step backwards in time through the steps that resulted in reaching a particular point in the program. Time traveling debuggers provide these features and also allow users to interact with the program, changing the history if desired, and watch how the program responds.[5]
https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr :
> System requirements: Linux kernel ≥ 3.11 is required (for PTRACE_SETSIGMASK).
> rr currently requires either:
> An Intel CPU with Nehalem (2010) or later microarchitecture. [OR] Certain AMD Zen or later processors
Is there an rr-like reverse time-travel debugging tool for ARM64/aarch64?
Are GUIs like Voltron and Ghidra helpful for gdb and/or rr-like traces?
rr works in principle on AArch64 though it requires an extremely recent CPU and the rest of system userspace to be compiled correctly.
Any gdb front end can probably be made to work with rr. Our current project is (shameless plug) https://pernos.co/ which provides a super-advanced GUI for working with (x86) rr traces.
"Support ARM" #1373 https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr/issues/1373
rr (software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rr_(debugging)
Record and replay debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_and_replay_debugging
/? site:github.com inurl:awesome https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agithub.com+inurl%3Aaw...
Arpchat – Text your friends on the same network using just ARP
libp2p/rust-libp2p: https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p
"chat with mdns does not work on the internet" https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-examples/issues/64 ... mdns.go: https://github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p/blob/master/examples/cha...
'Quantum hair’ could resolve Hawking’s black hole paradox, say scientists
Does this mean we can finally see the (collapsed, 'classical photonic') quantum information of dinosaurs which is never destroyed; by recalling information embedded in or relayed through such spaces; which are induced by cosmic rays, neutron stars, and possibly accelerators?
... That we can finally see dinosaurs?
A Primer on Proxies
Is it ok if I don’t like the term “reverse proxy”?
I find it entirely confusing and non-intuitive. I put it up there with idiotic terms like “OTT” which AFAIK just means “connected to the internet”.
Has always bothered me also, but that's the industry term so we are kind of stuck with it.
Proxy components are officially called Intermediaries in thr HTTP semantic specification; see https://httpwg.org/http-core/draft-ietf-httpbis-semantics-la....
Intermediaries can have different purposes. The official alternative to reverse proxy is "gateway", which is unfortunately overloaded with other kinds of gateways in networking.
Naming things is hard. Reverse proxy isn't great but all things considered is unique enough to allow folks to discriminate the sort of HTTP proxying that is happening
An HTTP reverse proxy forwards HTTP requests and adds e.g. X-Forwarded-For and X-Forwarded-Host headers.
https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/f... :
X-Forwarded-For: 12.34.56.78, 23.45.67.89
X-Real-IP: 12.34.56.78
X-Forwarded-Host: example.com
X-Forwarded-Proto: https
Forwarded: for=12.34.56.78;host=example.com;proto=https, for=23.45.67.89
k8s calls this "Ingress" and there are multiple "Ingress API" implementers; which essentially must reload the upstream server list on SIGHUP. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...
List of k8s Ingress Controllers: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...
> What is the difference between a reverse proxy and a load balancer?
Reverse proxy may or may not loadbalance requests. For example, in a sidecar configuration it can just terminate tls, provide telemetry, etc and forward everything to local port.
A [load-balancing] reverse proxy can also keep WAF rules in RAM for processing requests and responses. WAF: Web Application Firewall (OWASP CRS ruleset, CF ruleset,)
Methods for delegating HTTP requests to another application, with per-message overhead and inevitably-necessarily-tunable buffering: Layer 2 (MAC on a local segment), Layer 3 (IP), Layer 4 (TCP, UDP ports), Layer 7: HTTP parse and forward over network sockets or file sockets, defy separation of concerns and least privileges and run the (e.g. non-blocking Lua,) app within the webserver, Layer 7+: container service mesh Ingress API,
e.g. FastCGI uses file sockets, which avoids additional TCP overhead but doesn't really scale because sockets and network filesystems.
(ASGI is the Asynchronous WSGI, which specifies $ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE names as an interface contract in order to decouple web [[reverse] proxy] servers from web applications.)
Fundamentally, which variables passed in the e.g. os.environ dict like $REMOTE_USER and IDK is it like $SSL_CLIENT_CERT_SHA384, SSL_CLIENT_CERT_*; should downstream web applications simply trust as valid strings over what network path?
TLS re-termination.
Non-root [web] servers must run on ports less than 1024, which e.g. iptables or nftables (or eBPF) can easily port-forward to only if rewriting URLs within potentially-signed assets within HTTP messages and HTTP/3 UDP streams isn't necessary.
Ask HN: Tools to generate coverage of user documentation for code
Does anyone know of tools/techniques for generating a coverage report of user documentation over source code? In other words, I'd like to be able to automatically determine when there is documentation missing for an implemented feature or if there is documentation for a feature that was removed.
I'm asking because I've been working on a tool for many years and it's grown large enough that I have a hard time keeping track of what all the parts do and what has and has not been documented. What I'm thinking I'd like to do is add a tag to a piece of source code (C++) and put the corresponding tag in the user docs (RST). Then, during the build, I'd like a report of untagged code, code/docs with matching tags, and code/docs with unmatched tags.
I also feel like there should be at least two levels of documentation to be tracked: 1) the overall feature and 2) fine-details about how the feature behaves under different circumstances. For example, a feature that interacted with the network would have an overall description and some extra notes about how timeouts/retries are handled.
Does anyone have any experience with such a thing or have a similar interest?
"[Python-Dev] Should set objects maintain insertion order too?" https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/... :
> Are there URIs for Big-O notation that could be added as e.g. structured attributes in docstrings or annotations?
Looks like docutils supports bibliographic fields and a `metadata` directive: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.html...
RST field lists: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...
`sphinx-apidoc -M`: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/man/sphinx-apidoc.html
sphinx-contrib/apidoc re-runs sphinx-apidoc on every build to generate the doc stubs: https://github.com/sphinx-contrib/apidoc
awesome-sphinxdoc: https://github.com/yoloseem/awesome-sphinxdoc
Requirements traceability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_traceability
Test coverage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage
...
Someday I'd like to be able to express RDF triples in RST; wherein the preceding heading and/or a specific attribute specify the subject URI and then attr/value pairs are predicate/objects. IDK if that's even necessary for this application where you'd have the dotted-path of the __doc__ string to imply the subject URI?
: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1384081580218408962 :
How to express #LinkedData in
- [ ] LaTeX
- [x] HTML: RDFa, JSON-LD, Microdata
- [ ] YAML: YAML-LD
- [ ] Markdown: MyST-Markdown for executablebooks/jupyter-book (Sphinx roles and directives)
- [ ] reStructuredText (docutils)- [ ] SCH: SEON OWL ontology could grow a "Documentation"/"Docstring" rdfs:Class/owl:Class and requisite domains on possibly already covering properties to describe the URI-traceable relations between the artifacts: https://github.com/sealuzh/onts-seon :
> SEON consists of multiple ontologies, for example to describe stakeholders, activities, artifacts, and the relations among all of them. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the implementation of tools that help software engineers to manage software systems over their entire life-cycle.
jupyter-book (Sphinx (docutils), myst-parser, jupyter notebooks) > #879 "Generate OpenGraph metadata for social previews and cards" https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/issues/879#i...
Show HN: `Git add -p` with multiple buckets
There are probably a couple good ways to avoid trying to split `git add -p` with e.g. jujutsu `jj`? https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/blob/main/docs/git-comparis...
If CI isn't running tests for every PR, `git add -p` can create pretty patches that fail when attempting to `git bisect` later.
> Comprehensive support for rewriting history: Besides the usual rebase command, there's `jj describe` for editing the description (commit message) of an arbitrary commit. There's also `jj edit`, which lets you edit the changes in a commit without checking it out. To split a commit into two, use `jj split`. You can even move part of the changes in a commit to any other commit using `jj move`.
Beavers back in London after 400-year absence
Here in the US midwest beavers are shot and their dams dynamited wherever they are found.
The majority of the US used to be endless chains of mosquito-infested beaver ponds, the entire length of every stream and river. Nearly uninhabitable by people.
The extinction of the beaver is what made the US agriculturally useful. There's not a single landowner I know, who wants a random pond flooding their field, road or house.
For better or worse, the age of the beaver is definitely over. At least in the US.
In the Pacific Northwest, beavers increase resilience to wildfire and drought. They do so by creating natural fire breaks and by increasing groundwater storage. They also do this in a way that also creates fish habitat and deeper pools that coldwater fish like trout and salmon can take advantage of to survive lower water years.
They're really ecologically important, and while some may complain that they fall trees, that's actually very beneficial in the west where we have forest fires that burn far more trees than any beavers could hope to destroy to build their structures. This is not just for the northwest, but other drought and fire-prone western regions (Oregon, Colorado).
TL;DR Our elimination of beavers is exacerbating the problems of drought and fire in the american west.
Good video from PBS's Terra series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT5W32xRN4
"Leave It to Beavers" (2018) PBS Nature [53m] https://g.co/kgs/5yA9R5 :
> A growing number of scientists, conservationists and grass-roots environmentalists have come to regard beavers as overlooked tools when it comes to reversing the disastrous effects of global warming and world-wide water shortages. Once valued for their fur or hunted as pests, these industrious rodents are seen in a new light through the eyes of this novel assembly of beaver enthusiasts and “employers” who reveal the ways in which the presence of beavers can transform and revive landscapes. Using their skills as natural builders and brilliant hydro-engineers, beavers are being recruited to accomplish everything from finding water in a bone-dry desert to recharging water tables and coaxing life back into damaged lands.
Apparently beavers are attracted to the sound of running water.
Show HN: A Graphviz Implementation in Rust
Author of a web-based GraphViz editor [1] here. We're currently using viz.js [2], which is the original GraphViz compiled to WASM. Since viz.js is unmaintained, we're looking for a replacement.
This library looks really promising! As it's written in rust, it should be possible to port it to WASM. Are there plans in that direction?
Is it planned to be a drop-in replacement for GraphViz (or the dot engine)?
[1]: https://edotor.net [2]: https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js
awesome-graphviz #language-bindings, https://github.com/CodeFreezr/awesome-graphviz#language-bind...
awesome-network-analysis #javascript lists a few libraries. https://github.com/briatte/awesome-network-analysis#javascri...
FWIW, JupyterLite builds WASM as well
How to record data for reinforcement learning agent from any Linux game (2020)
The title is misleading, it promises recording data from *any* game, yet it requires some UDP telemetry to be implemented in the game itself and uses F1 as the game.
I was expecting something with a) strace to track IO or b) gdb to monitor specific memory regions which contain game state or c) some eBPF stuff (to track IO or memory aka a+b combined).
"Sysdig vs DTrace vs Strace: A technical discussion." https://sysdig.com/blog/sysdig-vs-dtrace-vs-strace-a-technic...
There are sysdig chisels that reference gdb.
https://github.com/openai/retro :
> Gym Retro lets you turn classic video games into Gym environments for reinforcement learning and comes with integrations for ~1000 games. It uses various emulators that support the Libretro API, making it fairly easy to add new emulators.
Podman can transfer container images without a registry
I wish containers hadn't created the abstractions of a registry and an image instead of exposing it all as tar files (which is what it kind of is under the covers) served over a glorified file server. This leads to people assuming there's some kind of magic happening and that the entire process is very arcane, when in reality it's just unpacking tar files.
If you want to DIY a container with unix tools, this should help: https://containers.gitbook.io/build-containers-the-hard-way/
"Signing Images with Docker Content Trust" explains how cryptographic container image signatures work w/ Docker Notary (TUF) https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/trust/#signing-image...
The TUF spec (and PyPI TUF PEPs) explains why a tar over https (with optional DNSSEC, a CA cert bundle, CRL, OCSP,) isn't sufficient for secure software distribution. "#ZeroTrust DevOps"; #DevSecOps
What's the favorite package format with content signatures, key distribution, a keyring of trusted (authorized) keys, and a cryptographically-signed manifest of per-file hashes, permissions, and extended file attributes? FWIW, ZIP at least does a CRC32.
We now have the Linux Foundation CNCF sigstore for any artifact, including OCI container images.
W3C ld-proofs is a newer web standard that unfortunately all package managers haven't yet migrated to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355786
Because ld-proofs is RDF, it works in JSON-LD and you could merge the entire SBOM [1] and e.g. CodeMeta [2] Linked Data metadata for all of the standardized-metadata-documented components in a stack.
[1] https://github.com/google/osv/issues/55
[2] https://github.com/codemeta/codemeta
Isn't this reinventing the wheel somehow? Linux distros have been using tar.gz over HTTP (not S!) and relying on GPG for years.
But most Linux distros are not that great either. They don't implement TUF and are not safe against some vectors prevented by that. It's OK to start anew when container distribution poses a different problem anyway.
The linked page doesn't explain anything at all. It says some incredibly obvious things (remotes can be compromised and you should be prepared for that) and then goes on to say the subject fixes all that, but there's actually no explanation of how it does that or what it does to get there. It's a marketing piece, essentially.
From this about DNSSEC and software supply chain security a couple weeks ago, from this about Android packages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27700513 :
>> [...] Sigstore is a free and open Linux Foundation service for asset signatures: https://sigstore.dev/what_is_sigstore/
>> The TUF Overview explains some of the risks of asset signature systems; key compromise, there's one key for everything that we all share and can't log the revocation of in a CT (Certificate Transparency) log distributed like a DLT, https://theupdateframework.io/overview/
>> Certificate Transparency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
>> Yeah, there's a channel to secure there at that layer of the software supply chain as well.
>> "PEP 480 -- Surviving a Compromise of PyPI: End-to-end signing of packages" (2014-) https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0480/
>>> Proposed is an extension to PEP 458 that adds support for end-to-end signing and the maximum security model. End-to-end signing allows both PyPI and developers to sign for the distributions that are downloaded by clients. The minimum security model proposed by PEP 458 supports continuous delivery of distributions (because they are signed by online keys), but that model does not protect distributions in the event that PyPI is compromised. In the minimum security model, attackers who have compromised the signing keys stored on PyPI Infrastructure may sign for malicious distributions. The maximum security model, described in this PEP, retains the benefits of PEP 458 (e.g., immediate availability of distributions that are uploaded to PyPI), but additionally ensures that end-users are not at risk of installing forged software if PyPI is compromised.
>> One W3C Linked Data way to handle https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication ( https://codemeta.github.io/user-guide/ ) cryptographic signatures of a JSON-LD manifest with per-file and whole package hashes would be with e.g. W3C ld-signatures/ld-proofs and W3C DID (Decentralized Identifiers) or x.509 certs in a CT log.
> FWIU, the Fuschia team is building package signing on top of TUF.
W3C Web Bundles + Linked Data for the SBOM and metadata could be a good solution for software supply chain security in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296573 :
>> Web Bundles, more formally known as Bundled HTTP Exchanges, are part of the Web Packaging proposal.
>> HTTP resources in a Web Bundle are indexed by request URLs, and can optionally come with signatures that vouch for the resources. Signatures allow browsers to understand and verify where each resource came from, and treats each as coming from its true origin. This is similar to how Signed HTTP Exchanges, a feature for signing a single HTTP resource, are handled.
How do these newer potential solutions compare to distributing packages and GPG-signed hash manifests over HTTP, with GPG public keys retrieved over HTTPS (HKP)? (Maybe with keys pinned in the GPG source codes for common key servers? Or why not?)
Are DNS (DNSSEC, DoH, DoT downgrade attacks), CA compromise (SPOF), and x.509 cert forgery still the significant potential points of failure? What of that can e.g. Web3 solve for?
Wut? I just make websites man.
I don't want to be dismissive, but I hate deploying my applications for this reason. I'm an application developer. I'm not averse to infrastructure as code, and containerization, and I'm happy to do ops for my preferred stack. But I can't learn all this stuff too.
Conveniently, Docker has abstracted 99% of what she said away from you.
Does `podman trust` also work yet? Shell commands from the first Docker docs link above:
docker trust key generate jeff
# docker trust key load key.pem --name jeff
docker trust signer add --key cert.pem jeff registry.example.com/admin/demo
docker trust sign registry.example.com/admin/demo:1
export DOCKER_CONTENT_TRUST=1
docker push registry.example.com/admin/demo:1
docker trust inspect --pretty registry.example.com/admin/demo:1
docker trust revoke registry.example.com/admin/demo:1Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function
Research on Blue light and sleep: https://justgetflux.com/research.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanopsin :
> Melanopsin photoreceptors are sensitive to a range of wavelengths and reach peak light absorption at blue light wavelengths around 480 nanometers.[30] Other wavelengths of light activate the melanopsin signaling system with decreasing efficiency as they move away from the optimum 480 nm. For example, shorter wavelengths around 445 nm (closer to violet in the visible spectrum) are half as effective for melanopsin photoreceptor stimulation as light at 480 nm.[30]
Under Melanopsin > infobox > "Biological process", e.g. "entrainment of circadian clock by photoperiod" and "regulation of circadian rhythm" are listed.
Show HN: Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page
I built a GitHub repository template which automates the process of configuring a new repository to take web page screenshots using GitHub Actions.
You can try this out at https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper-template
Use the https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper-template/generate interface to create a new repository using that template, and paste the URL that you want to take screenshots of in as the "description" field.
The new repository will then configure itself using GitHub Actions, take the screenshot and save it back to the repo!
This but automated visual regression testing (eg testing screenshots are the same) would be amazing. Anyone got any ideas how this might work with shot-scraper?
You could absolutely get this working with GitHub Actions with a bit of creativity.
I've been playing around with my own image-diff tool for this kind of thing, but it's not yet in a decent state: https://github.com/simonw/image-diff - there are other, better options out there such as https://github.com/mapbox/pixelmatch
Needle is an older system that did this using Selenium - updating that to work with Playwright (or Playwight via shot-scraper) would be an interesting project: https://github.com/python-needle/needle
Awesome Visual Regression Testing > lists quite a few tools and online services: https://github.com/mojoaxel/awesome-regression-testing#tools...
"visual-regression": https://github.com/topics/visual-regression
Cypress.io can run in a CI job, does Time Travel, works with DevTools debugger, can take screenshots and [headless] video, and it looks like there's a visual regression testing thing for it: https://github.com/mjhea0/cypress-visual-regression https://docs.cypress.io/guides/overview/why-cypress#Features
Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
The previous owner of my house was maintening a picture perfect green. With the kids and the jobs, I didn't want to follow that practice. Too much time for a soil not made for this, lots of fertilizer, various chemicals...
I fix the dead patches every spring and autumn with clover seeds and compost made from grass clippings, egg shells and vegetables/fruits peels. Zero fertilizer or weed killers, I remove by hand the weeds I don't like once in a while. I rake the garden twice a year to keep moss under control.
5 years later, our garden no longer looks like a green, but a prairie with the usual local plants. Since 2 years poppies are colonizing the most sun exposed parts, with spectacular blooms we are eagerly waiting for. Worms, larvae, slugs and snails are plenty, so birds are always at work foraging. Whatever dies during the hottest weeks regenerates in autumn. Plenty of bees are foraging the clovers and bindweed flowers.
It's looks nice, it's alive, it's much less work and money to maintain, it's self regenerating.
That's awesome - natural and native ecosystems are what we should be aiming for, not sterile lawns. It's better for the environment and for biodiversity, lower maintainence, and you get the benefits of an ecosystem like surprise blooms.
I don't know if you're aware of this (you probably are but I'm posting it for readers anyway) but there's a movement for doing this in many aspects of our nature management called permaculture. It's pretty cool!
Rewilding (conservation biology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding_(conservation_biolog...
Climate change mitigation effects of rewilding > Carbon sinks and removal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation#Carb...
Permaculture : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
It would also cut the number of interrupted Zoom meetings due to noise pollution in half.
Another reason for textual chat meetings with URLs, #hashTags, @atTags, an agenda at the top, headings, and a prepared, accessible transcript!
I’m not sure why this comment is grey. I know this wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone, but hey voice/video meetings don’t work well for some of us either. Folks, do what works for you and your team. Not everyone has to do the same thing.
Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes
I'm a practicing nuclear physicist and do work on gamma ray interactions with actinides. It's possible i'm missing something important, but i think this article is an utter mess and was clearly written by someone with absolutely no understanding of what they are saying. Attempting to learn anything from this article will be counterproductive.
Here is an explanation of chirped pulse amplification: https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.htm... This technique is for producing optical photons, which will have less than 10 ev of energy. In the same way that you can't focus the sun's light to a point that gets hotter than the surface of the sun (violates second law of thermodynamics), it isn't obvious how low energy laser pulses can be useful for this. The article offers no explanation whatsoever. Maybe the electric field across the nucleus can be made strong enough to induce scission?
In general, if you want to interact with the nucleus you need photons on the order of 1 Mev or more, whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the nucleus. These are gamma rays, which are not optical photons. There are ways to boost optical photons to those energies (like inverse compton scattering), but the article says nothing about that either. I would think inverse compton scattering of a chirped pulse from an electron packet in an accelerator will completely destroy the sharp timing and reflect the distribution of the electrons instead.
Mourou's Nobel lecture [1] has brief explanation of the envisioned process. The idea is to use intense laser pulses to accelerate deuterium ions into a tritium target. The deuterium-tritium fusion then generates high-energy neutrons that can transmutate nuclei.
This is probably not impossible, but I have doubts if this could be implemented efficiently at scale.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.91....
You can do that with fusor. It does direct acceleration without laser generation losses.
uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years
- U235 has a half life of 700,000,000 years.
If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level.
The article says nothing about how he hopes to gain 4 orders of magnitude. Is there some kind of Moore's law in the "speed" of these pulses?
I wasted my time reading this article, it explains nothing.
It's not a novel idea:
"Laser induced nuclear waste transmutation" https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08737
"Transmutation prospect of long-lived nuclear waste induced by high-charge electron beam from laser plasma accelerator" https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05770
"Fusion Driven Transmutation of Transuranics in a Molten Salt" https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08741
"Generic method to assess transmutation feasibility for nuclear waste treatment and application to irradiated graphite" https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02623
It never really occurred to me that transmutation is a reputable field of scientific study nowadays.
A sub-skill of Alchemy :-)
Show HN: Hubfs – File System for GitHub
HUBFS is a file system for GitHub and Git. Git repositories and their contents are represented as regular directories and files and are accessible by any application, without the application having any knowledge that it is really accessing a remote Git repository. The repositories are writable and allow editing files and running build operations.
Or you could, you know, clone the repository into a local working tree.
That works well for small repos or a few repos but if you want to find all cc files, at all release branch's, in your entire company and check for some exploit it is helpful to have a VFS. Makes it so you could also support N SCMs through one API. You just need to make a new VFS.
Isn't there already a good way to push computation closer to the data?
GmailFS and pyfilesystem (userspace FUSE) and rclone are neat as well.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1960799/how-to-use-git-a... explains about the `git push` step that git-remote-dropbox enables: https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox
GitHub also has a code search now: https://cs.github.com
Needing to tie into a specific API (like codesearch) couples you to the specific storage backend (Github). If you build your software to operate on a POSIX-y file system, you can support anything that shows up as a file system. For example: A local working tree of files, an NFS share, or now a remote git repository.
Running the code where the data already is saves network transfer: with data locality, you don't need to download each file before grepping.
Locality_of_reference#Matrix_multiplication explains how the cache miss penalty applies to optimizing e.g. matrix multiplication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference#Matrix_m...
Physicists steer chemical reactions by magnetic fields and quantum interference
Perhaps also practical for intersecting applications: "These Superabsorbent Batteries Charge Faster the Larger They Get: In the lab, the prototype quantum batteries are charged with light" https://spectrum.ieee.org/quantum-battery :
> Previous work found that matter could act collectively in surprising ways due to quantum physics. For example, in "superradiance," a group of atoms charged up with energy can release a far more intense pulse of light than they could individually.
> In the past decade, researchers have also discovered the reverse of superradiance was possible—superabsorption, with atoms cooperating to display enhanced absorption. However, until now superabsorption was seen for only small numbers of atoms.
[…]
> The new device consists of a reflective waferlike microcavity enclosing a semiconducting organic Lumogen F orange dye, which the researchers charged with energy using a laser. Ultrafast detectors helped the team monitor the way in which this dye charged and stored light energy at femtosecond resolution. As the microcavity size and the number of dye molecules increased, the charging time decreased.
Could a combo PV photovoltaic, storage, full-spectrum e.g. LED product for outdoor and/or indoor applications be created with super absorption, , and superradiance?
Maybe also wrap the thing in thin film (and/or graphene sheets that throw off electrons) to harvest energy off the thermal gradient around the unit; and shape it like self-cleaning petals.
White noise improves learning by modulating activity in midbrain regions (2014)
White noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402424 :
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation#Overview says brainwaves are 1-150 Hz? IIRC compassion is acheivable on a bass guitar.
Doodling improves memory retention / learning, too. IDK how much difference the content of a doodle makes? Hypothesis: Additional "cognitive landmarky" content in the doodle or received waveforms would increase retention up to a limit.
Regarding doodling, it seems that any active productive study method is at least somewhat beneficial. I've found this in my own personal experiments. For example, testing myself with cloze deletions, creating Anki cards, generating mind maps, Cornell notes, inline annotation/marginalia, doodling, generating questions, generating mnemonics, mind palaces, etc.
An interesting one is reading and reciting out loud: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658211.2017.1...
Another non-intuitive method that is helping me a lot is pacing around my house slowly while I read. It goes to show that cognition is an embodied phenomenon. It's unintuitive when intelligence is viewed from the traditional split mind/body paradigm but just take a look at an image of our nervous systems. Those wires to and from our brain and guts wrap around every part of us.
Memory and retention in learning > Methods of improving memory and retention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_and_retention_in_learni...
Mnemosyne/Anki, (FreeMind, yEd, Gephi, AtomSpace as-moses, RDF bnodes, ONNX,) mind maps, RestructuredRext, MyST-Markdown, todo.txt (TaskWarrior,), StructuredProcrastination, ActivityWatch, Dogsheep, *-to-sqlite, awesome-quantified-self, https://github.com/woop/awesome-quantified-self
But metrics for actual memory retention? I've heard of TinCan xAPI w/ a LRS. nbgrader, Khan Academy exercises, OpenBadges to demonstrate proficiency,
Awesome. Thanks for the resources. Coincidentally, I stumbled on this research today on the effect of exercise + meditation on word recall: https://hpp.tbzmed.ac.ir/PDF/hpp-9-314.pdf
"Episodic memory enhancement versus impairment is determined by contextual similarity across events" (2021) https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2101509118
From "How Our Environment Affects What We Remember" https://neurosciencenews.com/environment-memory-20165/amp/
Show HN: Prepform – AI and spaced-repetition to optimize learning
Hi, I'm Eric and I'm the founder and lead developer of Prepform.
A high-quality education helped me pursue my interests and achieve my goals. I started Prepform so students of all backgrounds have access to the same kind of education.
I grew up in Southern California, surrounded by dozens of SAT prep programs, and I swear I must have gone to all of them. Different programs followed different styles and techniques, but the strategy they shared was to create a study plan and review mistakes.
A study plan is taking a diagnostic test,
setting a target score,
creating a study schedule,
identifying mistakes, and finally
reviewing those mistakes.
I wanted to take this structure and optimize it with machine learning, while accounting for elements of human learning and memory. I'm a big fan of SuperMemo, a memorization technique developed by Piotr Wozniak, where you review material just as you're about to forget it. Cognitive psychology tells us human forgetting follows a pattern, but Piotr quantified this behavior to identify the precise moment forgetting happens.
The goal was to build on his research with AI and tailor it to not only test prep but to the individual student, and make it the engine of the study plan.
The result is Blended Prep, which guides students to internalize knowledge rather than memorize material, and gives them the best chance to ace their next exam.
I'm so excited to share this with the HN community, and would love to know what you think. You can try it out at https://prepform.com. Thanks for reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309645 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-28309645 :
Re: Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness,
> What are some of the more evidence-based (?) (early literacy,) reading curricula? OTOH: LETRS, Heggerty, PAL:
> Which traversals of a curriculum graph are optimal or sufficient?
> You can add https://schema.org/about and https://schema.org/educationalAlignment Linked Data to your [#OER] curriculum resources to increase discoverability, reusability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24527589 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24527589 :
>> A bottom-up (topologically sorted) computer science curriculum (a depth-first traversal of a Thing graph) ontology would be a great teaching resource.
>> One could start with e.g. "Outline of Computer Science", add concept dependency edges, and then topologically (and alphabetically or chronologically) sort.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
>> There are many potential starting points and traversals toward specialization for such a curriculum graph of schema:Things/skos:Concepts with URIs.
> https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ ... Ctrl-F "interview", "curriculum"
OpenBadges as Blockcerts for Q12 competencies
Why tensors? A beginner's perspective
I was happy to see that this article is actually talking about tensors, not just multidimensional arrays (which for some reasons are often called tensors by machine learning folks).
Same word, different contexts and meaning. In ML tensors are multidimensional arrays (and nothing more). Neither physicists nor ML researchers/developers are confused about what it means.
I'm pretty sure that a multidimensional array was the original implementation of tensors and the more fancy linear forms formalism came later in the twentieth century. Then the question was how do these multidimensional arrays operate on vectors and how do they transport around a manifold. (Source: first book I read on general relativity in the 1970s had a lot of pages about multidimensional arrays and also this good summary of the history: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2030558/what-is-the...
(Sort of like how vectors kind of got going via a list of numbers and then they found the right axioms for vector spaces and then linear algebra shifted from a lot of computation to a sort of spare and elegant set of theorems on linearity).
AFAIU, Matrices are categorically subsets of Tensors where the product operator, at least, is not the tensor product but the Dot product.
Dot product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_product
Matrix multiplication > Dot product, bilinear form and inner product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication#Dot_prod...
> The dot product of two column vectors is the matrix product
Tensor > Geometric objects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor :
> The transformation law for a tensor behaves as a functor on the category of admissible coordinate systems, under general linear transformations (or, other transformations within some class, such as local diffeomorphisms.) This makes a tensor a special case of a geometrical object, in the technical sense that it is a function of the coordinate system transforming functorially under coordinate changes.[24] Examples of objects obeying more general kinds of transformation laws are jets and, more generally still, natural bundles.[25][26]
Mathematicians are comfortable with the idea that a matrix can be over any set, in other words matrix is a mapping from the cartesian product of two intervals [0,N_i) to a given set S. Of course to define matrix multiplication you need at least a ring, but a matrix doesn’t have to define such an operation, and there are many alternative matrix products, for example you can define the Kronecker product with just a matrix over a group. Or no product at all for example a matrix over the set {Red,Yellow,Blue}.
Tensors require some algebraic structure, usually a vector space.
Booting ARM Linux the standard way
Fwiu, the magical path to launch Grub on an ARM board is:
/boot/efi/debian/grubaa64.efi
"DOC: How to boot into Grub" (in order to get a passphrase-protected graphical boot menu where you can modify kernel parameters like `rescue`) https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues/110
putting a file in /boot/efi/debian/ won't do anything at all unless the specific board you have already has platform firmware onboard to actually make that work. Arm EBBR complicant server boards do this for example, this won't work for the vast majority of ARM single board computers though.
PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead
Can anyone explain me like I'm five, why this major transition from PulseAudio to PipeWire is happening during the last year?
Pipewire was started by Wim Taymans, one of the gstreamer people. Originally it was supposed to allow video-streams in sandboxed environments like flatpak (and was known as "pulsevideo"), but then he noticed that it could be extended to do audio as well.
Since pulseaudio's architecture isn't well-suited to incorporate sandboxing, that project continued and it turned out that it could handle compatibility with both pulseaudio (the sound server for "consumerist" needs) and jack (the one for "pro audio" people where low latency is paramount).
You can even use programs like QJackCtl, which was written for Jack, to perform audio routing and stuff with pipewire!
So now, we have a sound server that
1. is much nicer to configure than pulseaudio
2. is compatible with sandboxing
3. is compatible with pulseaudio, jack and the older alsa APIs and features
4. is developed much more quickly than either of the others
See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire
> 2. is compatible with sandboxing
"DOC,ENH: How to connect container pipewire, alsa, jack to host pipewire (#1612)" https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/16...
How does database indexing work? (2008)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_index
https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/wiki/Database_index
From "Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28021766 re: edgesearch, HTTP/3 QUIC UDP, :
> Serverless full-text search with Cloudflare Workers, WebAssembly, and Roaring Bitmaps https://github.com/wilsonzlin/edgesearch
>> How it works: Edgesearch builds a reverse index by mapping terms to a compressed bit set (using Roaring Bitmaps) of IDs of documents containing the term, and creates a custom worker script and data to upload to Cloudflare Workers
WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas
Question for someone with gpu programming experience: is it feasible to analyze time series data (eg.: run a trading algorithm through a series of stock prices) in parallel (with the algorithms receiving different parameters in each core)?
If not then what is the limiting factor?
This depends on the algorithm. If it has lots of branching and control flow, then it's unlikely to run well. If it's based on something like FFT or any sort of linear algebra really, then it should run really well.
WebGPU is accessible enough maybe you should try it! You'll learn a lot either way, and it can be fun.
Isn't there something like SciPy which you can run on WebGPU?
https://wgpu-py.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guide.html :
> As WebGPU spec is being developed, a reference implementation is also being build. It’s written in Rust, and is likely going to power the WebGPU implementation in Firefox. This reference implementation, called wgpu-native, also exposes a C-api, which means that it can be wrapped in Python. And this is what wgpu-py does.
> So in short, wgpu-py is a Python wrapper of wgpu-native, which is a wrapper for Vulkan, Metal and DX12, which are low-level API’s to talk to the GPU hardware.
So, it should be possible to WebGPU-accelerate SciPy; for example where NumPy is natively or third-partily CUDA-accelerated
edit: Intel MKL, https://Rapids.ai,
> Seamlessly scale from GPU workstations to multi-GPU servers and multi-node clusters with Dask.
Where can WebGPU + IDK WebRTC/WebSockets + Workers provide value for multi-GPU applications that already have efficient distributed messaging protocols?
"Considerable slowdown in Firefox once notebook gets a bit larger" https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/1639#issueco... Re: the differences between the W3C Service Workers API, Web Locks API, and the W3C Web Workers API and "4 Ways to Communicate Across Browser Tabs in Realtime" may be helpful.
Pyodide compiles CPython and the SciPy stack to WASM. The WASM build would probably benefit from WebGPU acceleration?
Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)
It often isn’t about the execution time, if it’s a daily job and takes 26 minutes who cares?
Using something like databricks means it is easy to schedule and manage jobs, easy to write jobs that work in good enough time, easy to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
It comes with a well documented security mode and a support contract when needed.
Developers can be onboarded quickly and work code reviewed and managed.
Logging and diagnostics are available and you can report on metrics easily.
That isn’t true with custom data pipelines written in shell scripts.
The value isn’t in the pure execution time, it is in everything around it.
Can't you just ask one of the machines in the databricks/spark cluster to run those shell commands?
Or is that more of a kubernetes thing?
That's pretty much how Dask works; though Dask doesn't throw away data types for newline-delimited strings between each failed partitioned IPC pipeline process, and then the new hire didn't appropriately trap errors in their shell script, so the log messages are chronologically non-sequential and text-only.
https://github.com/dask/dask-labextension :
> This package provides a JupyterLab extension to manage Dask clusters, as well as embed Dask's dashboard plots directly into JupyterLab panes.
Something like ml-hub allows MLops teams to create resource-quota'd containers with k8s and IAM, though even signed code can DoS an unauditable system with no logs of which processes ran which signed archive of which code at what time, with bash and ssh. https://github.com/ml-tooling/ml-hub
CPython, C standards, and IEEE 754
I don't know why GCC-12 was in the picture, but I hope all of you can understand one thing: python's source code must be compatible with GCC 6. And no so called "Threading [Optional]" features. It is all because CentOS is dead. CentOS has been sold to IBM. There is no CentOS 8 anymore. The free lunch is ended. And there wouldn't be another OSS project to replace it.
Linux kernel developers want to use C11. CPython developers want to use C11. But does your compiler support it? If you were a C++ developer, would you request C++17/C++20 also?
CPython must be aligned with the manylinux project. manylinux build every python minor release from source. Historically manylinux only use CentOS. CentOS has devtoolset, which allows you use the latest GCC in an very old Linux release. Red hat has spent much time on it. Now you can't get it for free because CentOS is dead. So the manylinux community is switching to Ubuntu. Ubuntu can only provide GCC 6 to them. If anycode in CPython is not compatible with GCC6, then manylinux will have to drop ubuntu too. And they don't have any other alternative. As I said, for now Red Hat devtoolset is the only solution. When IBM discontinued the CentOS project, most people do not understand what it means to the OSS community.
(I work for Microsoft. It doesn't stop me to love Linux.)
> for now Red Hat devtoolset is the only solution. When IBM discontinued the CentOS project, most people do not understand what it means to the OSS community.
"Compilers and Runtimes" > "CentOS sysroot for linux-* Platforms" https://conda-forge.org/docs/maintainer/infrastructure.html#...
From https://conda-forge.org/docs/user/announcements.html :
>> 2021-10-13: GCC 10 and clang 12 as default compilers for Linux and macOS
>> These compilers will become the default for building packages in conda-forge.
Conda-forge specifies enough to solve for CentOS sysroot compatibility and newer GCC is already specified.
CentOS (RHEL SRPMs with RH trademarks removed + EPEL) lives on as {Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, CentOS Stream,} and SUSE is still RHEL-compatible.
https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel :
>> Build Python wheels for all the platforms on CI with minimal configuration.
>> Python wheels are great. Building them across Mac, Linux, Windows, on multiple versions of Python, is not.
>> cibuildwheel is here to help. cibuildwheel runs on your CI server - currently it supports GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, and GitLab CI - and it builds and tests your wheels across all of your platforms.
Ask HN: Books recommendations on developing critical thinking?
hoping get your recommedation on critical thinking, decision under uncertainity - other than khaneman's book.
"Ask HN: How can I “work-out” critical thinking skills as I age?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24026223
Causal_inference#Methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference#Methodology
Web Share API
From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Share_A... :
> The Web Share API allows a site to share text, links, files, and other content to user-selected share targets, utilizing the sharing mechanisms of the underlying operating system. These share targets typically include the system clipboard, email, contacts or messaging applications, and Bluetooth or WiFi channels
> Note: This API should not be confused with the Web Share Target API, which allows a website to specify itself as a share target
W3C Web Share Target API: https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/ :
> This specification defines an API that allows websites to declare themselves as web share targets, which can receive shared content from either the Web Share API, or system events (e.g., shares from native apps).
W3C Web Share API: https://w3c.github.io/web-share/ :
> This specification defines an API for sharing text, links and other content to an arbitrary destination of the user's choice.
Ask HN: Is Kubernetes the only alternative for being cloud agnostic?
My company's management desires for us to be "cloud agnostic" - without having a firm definition of what that actually means. Lots of people in my company think "cloud agnostic" means you "containerize" your solutions and run them on Kubernetes. Then you can pick and move your application from cloud to cloud as desired. That seems extremely limited to me. To me that thinking exemplifies the cloud as being "someone else's computer" rather than seeing the cloud as an application platform in and of itself.
What does HN think about this? Is there a way of looking at "cloud agnostic" that still allows you to look at the cloud as an application platform and not just as a platform for running Kubernetes? Is there another way to think about this?
We have ansible playbooks that we wrote leveraging some of the ansible-galaxy stuff, and they do the same thing either on-prems or in cloud. I would say we're pretty cloud native, we follow best practices and deploying something to a cloud provider or internally is the same thing.
Our level of abstraction is containers, we don't use services that cloud providers sell, for example, Lambda, as they are very cloud provider specific. We prefer to use technologies like RabbitMQ which can be deployed on any cloud or on prems easily.
Ansible & k8s:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/scenario_guides/kube...
ansible-collections/kubernetes.core: https://github.com/ansible-collections/kubernetes.core
geerlingguy/ansible-for-kubernetes book: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-for-kubernetes
openshift/openshift-ansible: https://github.com/openshift/openshift-ansible
OKD is the open source (RedHat, (IBM)) OpenShift, which wraps kubernetes ; sort of like AWX : https://github.com/openshift/okd
> [OKD] Features: A fully automated distribution of Kubernetes on all major clouds and bare metal, OpenStack, and other virtualization providers;
Single-node OpenShift 4 requires at least 16GB of RAM and 8 vCPU : https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/single-node-openshift-manufac...
> Single node OpenShift offers both control and worker node capabilities in a single server and provides users with a consistent experience across the sites where OpenShift is deployed, regardless of the size of the deployment.
MicroShift requires 2Gb of RAM on e.g. an ARM64 Raspberry Pi 4 or similar SBC: https://microshift.io/docs/getting-started/
Terraform doesn't require k8s: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform
OpenStack is somewhat EC2 API compatible, but the reverse is not true.
Bootloader Basics
Author of the post here, thanks for sharing! Happy to answer any questions, though even after the few nights spent getting these programs to work I had many questions of my own.
Excellent post! I had a lot of fun writing a bootloader game sometime ago and wrote a post about it, it's a 2048 clone: https://crocidb.com/post/bootsector-game/
That's a great one! Added it to my list of suggested reading in the repo.
https://github.com/eatonphil/bootloaders/blob/main/README.md
- uboot w/ Pinebook Pro : https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/u-boot https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Uboot
- pboot w/ Pinephone Pro: https://xnux.eu/p-boot/
- tow-boot: "ENH: "Chainload" to {grub,}" https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues/110 https://github.com/rhboot/grub2/blob/master/grub-core/loader...
Automerge: A JSON-like data structure (a CRDT) that can be modified concurrently
An interesting challenge in the CRDT era today, is that there isn't an ideal CRDT for rich text yet. I mean, not just simple boundary based formattings like bold/italics but also complex block based elements like tables and lists.
While recent CRDTs like peritext has done an incredible job of focussing on this specific problem of rich text, even that project hasn't extended its types to cover table operations and list operations. I've been thinking about this problem deeply and my intuition is that anything that resembles semantic trees are tricky to deal with using a generic CRDT.
For example a generic tree/json CRDT cannot be used for an AST tree - and it will most likely fail. I wrote about this a while back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29433896
If you have ideas on how to approach this problem, join us on this thread https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext/issues/27#issuecomm...
I can't find a link right now but I believe Kevin is in the process of implementing "move" in Yjs, so that if you copy and paste from a section or split it, it is a move rather than a delete and insert.
Agreed on tables, they are so much more complex and may need further operation types to ensure no dropped edits.
Obviously with Peritext you are implementing a very rich text focused CRDT. The way I see it is there are general purpose and domain specific CRDTs, Yjs being more general purpose but with a concept of 'marks' on strings for formatting. Ultimately we need both and I like the concept of one that covers both bases so you can have a db document that contains rich text fields along with more traditional structured data.
Without exactly domain specific CRDTs for your application you will always have to do some level of schema correction after merging documents.
Re: inlined tabular data in CRDT distributed systems for collaboration on documents that may be required to validate:
Atomicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_(database_systems)
> An atomic transaction is an indivisible and irreducible series of database operations such that either all occurs, or nothing occurs.[1] A guarantee of atomicity prevents updates to the database occurring only partially, which can cause greater problems than rejecting the whole series outright. As a consequence, the transaction cannot be observed to be in progress by another database client. At one moment in time, it has not yet happened, and at the next it has already occurred in whole (or nothing happened if the transaction was cancelled in progress).
> An example of an atomic transaction is a monetary transfer from bank account A to account B. It consists of two operations, withdrawing the money from account A and saving it to account B. Performing these operations in an atomic transaction ensures that the database remains in a consistent state, that is, money is neither lost nor created if either of those two operations fail. [2]
IIRC, Apache Wave (Google Wave (2009)) solves for tables but is not built atop a CRDT, like Docs and Sheets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
Jupyterlab/rtc - Jupyterlab, JupyterLite (WASM), - is built upon a CRDT for .ipynb JSON, at least. https://github.com/jupyterlab/rtc
(URI-) Named Graphs as JSON-LD would work there, too. https://json-ld.org/playground/
Does Dokieli have atomic table operations for ad-hoc inlined tables as RDF Linked Data? https://github.com/linkeddata/dokieli
I think there is some confusion over "tables", the GP I believe was referring to typographic "rich text" tables, like you have in a word document, rather than a "data table" in a DB.
The issue with "rich text" tables and CRDTs is that you effectively have two overlapping "blocks", columns and rows. Current CRDTs are good at managing a list of blocks, splitting them, reordering them. Most rich rich text tables are represented as a list of rows of cells.
If you have two clients, one adds a new row (represented as a new row in rows list), and the other adds a new column (represented as a new cell in each row in the rows list), and then merge, you have a conflict where the new row and column meet. There is a missing cell, and so you end up with a row that is one cell too short.
What is needed is a CRTD that has a concept of a table, or table like structure, so that when the documents are merged it knows to add that extra cell in the new row.
This has nothing to do with Atomicity in the traditional DB transaction sense.
Edit:
Just thinking about this a little more, if you model the table as a list of maps, with each column having a unique id it would overcome the misalignment issue, and it potentially helps with other table conflicts too. You would however have to store the order of the columns somewhere and deleting columns could conflict.
> This has nothing to do with Atomicity in the traditional DB transaction sense.
Partial application of conflicting additive schema modifications is an atomicity issue as much as it is a merge issue. If the [HTML] doesn't validate before other nodes are expected to synchronize with it, that changeset shouldn't apply at all; atomicity.
It looks like Dokieli supports embedded tables.
With RDF (and triplestores, and property graphs), you can just add "rows" and "columns" (rdfs:Class instances with rdfs:Property instances) without modifying the schema or the tabular data. Online schema migration is dangerous with SQL, too, because the singular db user account for the app shouldn't have [destructive] ALTER TABLE privileges.
"CSV on the Web: A Primer" > "Validating CSVs" (CSVW Tabular Data) https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#validating-csvs
A 13-year-old used my artificial nose to diagnose pneumonia
Hmmm... I'm skeptical. Not necessarily because I don't think that pneumonia could be detected by testing VOCs in breath, but because I'm currently working on a project that uses sensors to do breath analysis and my amateur research has informed me that it's fairly hard to get right (which is why my primary goal is to identify deltas rather than achieve numerical accuracy).
For one, VOCs can be present in breath for other reasons besides some sort of infection in the lung, and VOCs are incredibly hard to differentiate with just a sensor. The fact that they tend to be faint in human breath even at their highest (in contrast to O2 and CO2) doesn't help. Even the most expensive PID sensors for VOCs (they get up into the several hundreds a pop) can't really tell you whether the predominant gas is acetone or alcohol or acetaldehyde or hydrogen sulfide. So you've got to figure out whether the presence of VOCs is truly an anomaly and not just a part of ketosis. In which case you will also need to measure at least VeO2 to see whether the VOCs correspond with the Respiratory Quotient.
The "e-nose" project, as described on the MakeZine article, doesn't appear to do that. It does have an alcohol sensor. But these sensors aren't particularly sophisticated. They use semiconductors with heating elements to detect the presence of gases, and there is almost certainly some overlap between the alcohol and VOCs sensors.
If VOCs are produced by pneumonia, then yes, it's conceivable that even just the VOCs sensor alone would detect this. But can this group of sensors used in the e-nose differentiate pneumonia from catabolism?
Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After all, this thing uses AI. And maybe AI can recognize something that a human can't by simply looking at a line graph. I dunno... Such things should be tested against known inputs before being suggested to diagnose anything.
In my experience, "AI can extract more information from sensors" is mostly a myth.
An example is the SCIO sensor ( https://nocamels.com/2019/03/scio-kickstarter-darling-promis... ) which was a cheap handheld spectrometer that claimed to accurately determine the nutritional information of any food you pointed it at.
One good way to debunk this is to measure raw sensor output and compute Mutual Information (which incorporates sensor noise/variability). If the sensor only produces X bits of information, no algorithm will be able to extract more classes than that. In the SCIO case it was just under 8 bits total of information. So something like a poor color sensor. You could train on apples and oranges and maybe do an investor demo, but it's not actually going to do anything useful (as the Kickstarter crowd soon learned).
Is the limit: A) sensor resolution, B) NN architecture and/or algorithm, C) training sample size, D) training data (labeling, segmentation) quality, or E) it doesn't sufficiently predict the variance with low enough error?
New NN models are able to do more with the exact same sensor data.
You cannot conjure information out of thin air. Even with infinite data and a hypothetical wormhole CPU that runs everything in O(1) and solves the halting problem, you still couldn't do this. So to answer your question, the reason is effectively (A). Sensor resolution might be the wrong term but it's the general idea.
How much information content is there in DNA (and RNA,)? How do creatures know or learn what not to eat given limited available sensor data?
How much information content is there in DNA? 2 bits per base, before compression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3220916/
How do creatures know what to eat? Evolution solved that for most creatures, so their sensors don't have to work as hard at runtime. And in other cases, some number of members of a population of creatures will die before the population learns the food is poisonous. Our sensors, and the information processing systems that manage their outputs, are remarkably efficient data processing engines that do the equivalent of approximating and predicting, often well beyond what the most advanced deep learning systems are capable of doing now.
So, sensor resolution is higher, there are multiple fields being integrated, in a massively-parallel spreading-activation Biological Neural Network, and that's how blank-slate creatures just know?
Is there enough information content - per the Shannon entropy definition or otherwise - in DNA and/or RNA to code for the survival-selected traits that
I'm not sure that the (Shannon entropy, MIC, Kolmogorov,) information content of the samples is the limit of any given network trained therefrom? Is there anything to be gained from upsampling and adding e.g. gaussian blur (noise)? Maybe it's feature engineering, maybe it's expert methods bias, maybe it's just sensor fusion; that's the magic noise.
Perhaps this is moving the goalposts a bit, but e.g. depixelation does appear to defy such a presumed limit due to apparent information content? Perhaps it is that the network reading the sensor carries additional information associated with the lower-resolution or additional-fields' sensor data?
https://github.com/krantirk/Self-Supervised-photo :
> Given a low-resolution input image, PULSE searches the outputs of a generative model (here, StyleGAN) for high-resolution images that are perceptually realistic and downscale correctly.
Maybe no amount of feature engineering can actually add information?
Lit-up fishing nets reduce catch of unwanted sharks, rays and squid: study
Is there some way to make fishing nets out of e.g. bioluminescent, biodegradable, carbon negative organic material?
LEDs that biodegrade after ___ years would be a good idea, too. MEMS-powered?
Design of a rapid transit to Mars mission using laser-thermal propulsion
WebGL 2.0 Achieves Pervasive Support from All Major Web Browsers
Why though? WebGL is already getting left behind for WebGPU.
WebGPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU
> WebGPU is the working name for a future web standard and JavaScript API for accelerated graphics and compute, aiming to provide "modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities". It is developed by the W3C GPU for the Web Community Group with engineers from Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and others. [1]
Uniting the Linux random-number devices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random#Linux has :
> In October 2016, with the release of Linux kernel version 4.8, the kernel's /dev/urandom was switched over to a ChaCha20-based cryptographic pseudorandom number generator (CPRNG) implementation [16] by Theodore Ts'o, based on Bernstein's well-regarded stream cipher ChaCha20.
> In 2020, the Linux kernel version 5.6 /dev/random only blocks when the CPRNG hasn't initialized. Once initialized, /dev/random and /dev/urandom behave the same. [17]
Carbon Robotics new LaserWeeder with 30 lasers to autonomously eradicate weeds
From the article:
> In addition to an updated build, the 2022 LaserWeeder features 30 industrial CO2 lasers, more than 3X the lasers in Carbon Robotics’ self-driving Autonomous LaserWeeder, creating an average weeding capacity of two acres per hour. Growers who use Carbon Robotics’ implements are seeing up to 80% savings in weed management costs, with a break-even period of 2-3 years.
How does this compare to competing laser weeding robots?
Agricultural robot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
Launch HN: Pelm (YC W22) – Plaid for Utilities
Hi HN, Drew and Edmund from Pelm here (https://www.pelm.com). We are building an API that allows developers to access energy data, such as electricity usage or billing data, from utilities.
Currently, if you want to build an application on top of energy data, you have to build integrations with utilities across the country. Not only is this time-consuming, it's super frustrating given the lack of data standardization and the clunky, high-friction integration processes that energy companies use. With Pelm, you only have to integrate with one service to access utility data, and you get to use a seamless, well-documented API built by other developers.
We are software engineers (from Asana and Affirm) who are enthusiastic about sustainability and the creation of a more modern energy grid. We talked with lots of developers who were frustrated from trying to work with energy data and saw an opportunity to meet their needs while supporting the push for a more efficient energy grid.
Most companies trying to tackle this problem are energy companies, not technology companies. The products they build don't keep the user in mind and only focus on meeting bare functional requirements. Pelm, by contrast, is by-developers-for-developers. Our focus is ease of use. Our API is simple to get up and running (under ten minutes) and provides clear documentation and instructions.
It works like this: you register for our service and embed Connect (our front-end plugin) into your application. The end user uses Connect to authorize access to their data from their particular utility. We scrape electricity usage and billing data from their utility account and store it in a standardized format in a database. Your application can then query electricity interval data and billing data for the end user through our REST API. We also recently built out functionality to pay utility bills through our API.
Our API is designed for apps that do things like help consumers reduce electricity usage, charge EVs at optimal times, optimize HVAC installs, or educate on climate-friendly practices.
One example of how Pelm can currently be used is in demand response programs—that’s when utilities pay companies to get large amounts of people to reduce their electricity consumption during peak hours. Our API can help measure the reduction, which determines how much the company gets paid. Another example: solar panel installers can use us to show potential clients how much they could save on their electricity bill by installing solar. Another is community solar programs that allow people to buy into remote solar farms and get credit for the generated energy from utilities. Pelm can be used by community solar providers to calculate and bundle bills.
(By the way, an interesting little-known fact: this space is possible because of a 2012 initiative by Obama that required utilities to allow consumers more visibility into their energy consumption habits.)
Pelm is free up to 100 API calls and 10 active end users per month. After that we charge on a usage based plan: $0.10/call and $0.50/active end user up to 10,000 API calls and 1,000 active users. Past that limit, you'll move onto an enterprise plan with a flat monthly rate based on your service level and an adjusted rate for calls and active end users (we’re still figuring out the exact parameters).
We’d love to hear any of your ideas or experiences within this space! We’re always looking for creative approaches to the problem and ways we can better the developer experience we’re building. If you get a chance to test out the API, please share your feedback on how we could improve it. Thanks so much!
Two questions:
How are you connecting to the users energy supplier, I assume most don't have their own apis and so you are having to save the users login credentials? If so you should list the security measures you are taking to ensure that are safely stored. This is much like how developers had to connect to banks before they started supporting standard apis.
Which utility companies can you currently connect to? Again may be worth listing them on the site.
Great callout. Passwords are encrypted using a 256-bit AES cipher and are never persisted or shown to developers in plaintext. We currently support PG&E and SCE with a ComEd integration landing within the week.
What does it cost a utility to add e.g. read-only OAuth token support to their customer-facing app?
FWIU, it's pretty easy to add OAuth support to any HTTP API endpoint with e.g. Nginx auth_request or by integrating an OAuth library with automated tests into the application at the url routes, if nothing else.
Do you have a "Guide for utilities who want users to have a safe third-party read-only API", a Developer portal, or like a decision tree for which script to read a decision-maker or a front-line lackey who doesn't know anything about APIs?
Does Pelm integrate with Zapier? https://zapier.com/platform
Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually
SHA2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2
https://rosettacode.org/wiki/SHA-256
Hashcat's GPU-optimized OpenCL implementation: https://github.com/hashcat/hashcat/blob/master/OpenCL/inc_ha...
Bitcoin's CPU-optimized sha256.cpp, sha256_avx2.cpp, sha256_sse4.cpp, sha256_sse41.cpp: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/crypto/sh...
https://github.com/topics/sha256 https://github.com/topics/sha-256
Cryptographic_hash_function#Cryptographic_hash_algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function#Cr...
Merkle–Damgård construction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%E2%80%93Damg%C3%A5rd_...
(... https://rosettacode.org/wiki/SHA-256_Merkle_tree ... Merkleized IAVL+ tree that is balanced with rotations in order to optimize lookup,: https://github.com/cosmos/iavl
Self-balancing binary search tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-balancing_binary_search_t... )
Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron paved the way for AI 60 years too soon (2019)
Perceptron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron #History, #Variants
An MLP: Multilayer Perceptron can learn XOR and is considered a feed-forward ANN: Artificial Neural Network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilayer_perceptron
Backpropagation: 1960-, 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
1999 Repeal of Glass-Steagall was the worst deregulation enacted in US history
Yeah what was the deal with that dotcom correction in the early 2000s? Did banks invest differently after GLBA said that they can gamble against peoples' savings deposits (because they created a 'sociallist' $100b credit line, called it FDIC, and things like that don't happen anymore)
Decline of the Glass-Steagall Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Glass%E2%80%93S...
Dot-com bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
Would a [premined, escrowed] stablecoin token make it easier to answer these kinds of Transparency and Accountability questions in regards to government spending and government stimulus funding beyond intra-governmental transfers of real value?
Said stablecoin token would be hosted on more or more resilient Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs; 'blockchains') with a - indeed more auditable - transaction record specification that supports multiple transaction inputs and outputs and an optional identifier such as an e.g. "coinbase field" to key auxilliary (unfortunately comparably mutable, offsite-backuped by which responsible parties) database records to.
The issue here is not transparency, it's who the money was directed to. This is a policy question, and what type of currency you use is totally irrelevant. It's already very easy to see who received money (https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/), what we're discussing is whether it should have been given to different people.
So, in your opinion, the "And then where did the money go?" question is entirely distinct from the "Did those investments have the desired impact for the desired audience, per the predefined criteria for success?" question? Who were we doing capital investment for, in hopes of them raising additional separately-accounted-for monies? https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-25893860 re: https://www.usaspending.gov/
Oh, are you talking about tracking the money after it's been loaned out? Like for a given dollar we can see that it was loaned to Company X, then paid to an employee, then spent on rent, then spent at a restaurant, etc. If that's what you mean then I agree it would be useful for studying the impacts of stimulus policies, although I think there are a lot of other privacy impacts we'd need to consider.
You can always launder money to defeat such a trail. I'm not going to go into detail about how, just in case my ignorant ramblings have some novel techniques in there, but it's definitely possible.
Like with banning encryption, the privacy impacts would be felt by the little people, and the big bad actors would be largely unaffected.
So we rely upon reports apparently generated from reconciled alternate accounting systems to determine whether the funds were appropriated impactfully?
TheGivingBlock specializes in handling cryptoasset donations with tax receipts. (We don't yet (?) prefill returns in the US)
When you donate to a TheGivingBlock Cause Fund, you get a tax receipt by email and the donation is privately sent to each of the multiple registered nonprofit charities included in that particular Fund.
TheGivingBlock Cause Funds map to the UN SDG Sustainable Development Goals; are categorically aligned to the #GlobalGoals Goals, but not yet (?) to specific Targets or Indicators. https://thegivingblock.com/donate/
Re: CharityNavigator nonprofit rating methodology, SDG-aligned GRI Corporate Sustainability Reports, setting up a CharityVest charitable matching fund for your employees, SDGs,: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412594 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24412594 CharityVest feedback: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-23907902
How should nonprofits be evaluated in order to invest impactfully?
If somebody says "Strategic Alignment" again, will less-impactful cashflows be eliminated?
When the government nonprofit invests in government services, nonprofits, NGOs, international aid, and for-profit entities, how do we evaluate per-investment/per-allocation ROI according to the predefined criteria at regular intervals, potentially with incremental commitment?
So, the specific fund allocation control adjustments being requested here are presumably due to feedback (sensor data and nonlinearity) which may or may not be traceable to an actual funding suggestion allocation task item in the near future, presumably
Most of the highest-impact charities wouldn't score highly on a “what happens to the money” metric. Think of the good stuff the Gates Foundation has been doing, or the GiveWell top charities. It's a good way of measuring the benefits of cash injection, but that's all.
no
What would be better feedback for developing a resilient economy together? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory#Fee...
Ask HN: Do you use TLA+?
It's surprising to me that so many crypto projects don't use TLA+. Besides the ones mentioned here (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/industrial-use.html), does your company use TLA+? Why? Why not?
## TLA+
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA%2B
Src: https://github.com/tlaplus/tlaplus
Awesome: https://github.com/tlaplus/awesome-tlaplus
### Dr TLA+
Web: https://github.com/tlaplus/DrTLAPlus
Src: https://github.com/tlaplus/DrTLAPlus :
> Dr. TLA+ series - learn an algorithm and protocol, study a specification; [Byzantine] Paxos, Raft, Cosmos,
##
"Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport" ( https://g.co/kgs/nx1BaB
##
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-27442819 :
> Can there still be side channel attacks in formally verified systems? Can e.g. TLA+ help with that at all?
New material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy
Not quite the same, but got me thinking: Could we theoretically power and refuel car in the following way:
- Take a cube of X elastic material and squish it really dense with a big machine.
- Power the car via the pressure of the material trying to expand.
- Once it's nearly depleted (fully expanded), take it to another squishing station.
I imagine you couldn't store anywhere near enough power that way today, but then that's also the kind of problem the linked material is trying to solve, right?
Compressed air energy storage is already a thing!
The energy stored is limited by the tensile strength of the container. The best capacity for a unit weight is from laminated carbon fibre tanks, but this still doesn’t even approach the energy density of ordinary hydrocarbon fuels.
You’ll find that there’s lots of interesting ways to store energy — like flywheels or chemical cells — but one way or another they’re all inherently limited by chemical bond strengths.
Fundamentally all energy storage is some sort of stored “tension” in chemical bonds that can be released to do useful work.
The reason fuels are so good is that this release needs a second component (oxygen) that is kept separated. This makes high energy densities safe.
No separation — like with compressed gas — means that the energy storage is a bomb waiting to go off. It would be too dangerous to use.
There are various forms of energy and various forms of energy storage, including chemical energy and gravitational potential energy.
We probably think of energy as entropy like gases because e.g Maxwell?
Examples of gravitational potential energy:
- A water tower or a pulley with weight suspended a greater distance from the most local mass/graviton centroid.
Potential energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_energy
WebVM: Server-less x86 virtual machines in the browser
Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-packages.html#lo...
Does WebVM solve for workload transparency, CPU overutilization by one tab, or end-to-end code signing maybe with W3C ld-proofs and whichever future-proof signature algorithm with a URL?
The VM cannot have full TCP/IP stack, so any data research tasks are likely to need a special code paths and support for downloads. No SQL databases, etc.
From "Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28021766 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-28021766 :
DuckDB can query [and page] Parquet from GitHub, sql.js-httpvfs, sqltorrent, File System Access API (Chrome only so far; IDK about resource quotas and multi-GB datasets), serverless search with WASM workers
https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs :
> sql.js is a light wrapper around SQLite compiled with EMScripten for use in the browser (client-side).
> This [sql.js-httpvfs] repo is a fork of and wrapper around sql.js to provide a read-only HTTP-Range-request based virtual file system for SQLite. It allows hosting an SQLite database on a static file hoster and querying that database from the browser without fully downloading it.
> The virtual file system is an emscripten filesystem with some "smart" logic to accelerate fetching with virtual read heads that speed up when sequential data is fetched. It could also be useful to other applications, the code is in lazyFile.ts. It might also be useful to implement this lazy fetching as an SQLite VFS [*] since then SQLite could be compiled with e.g. WASI SDK without relying on all the emscripten OS emulation.
Also, I'm not sure if jupyterlab/jupyterlab-google-drive works in JupyterLite yet? Is it yet possible to save notebooks and other files from JupyterLite running in WASM in the browser to one or more cloud storage providers?
https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-google-drive/issues...
The VM could have its own TCP/IP stack, possibly with a SLIRP layer for translation of connections to the outside. Internet connectivity can be done by limiting it to AJAX, or forwarding the packets to a proxy (something like http://artemyankov.com/tcp-client-for-browsers/), or including a Tor client that connects to a Tor bridge, etc.
StackBlitz' WebContainers have in-browser TCP/IP stack, I think from MirageOS.
How does it get raw ip packets out from inside the browser?
Does it need to reframe packet structs and then fix fragmentation issues, or can it set the initial MSS (because MTU discovery likely won't work quite right) so that it doesn't have to ~shrink and re-fragment tunneled {TCP,} packets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_segment_size#MSS_and_M...
Plant-based epoxy enables recyclable carbon fiber
FWIU flax and hemp are more sustainable and potential substitutes for carbon fiber, which is industrially hazardous to produce?
The branching structure makes e.g. hemp bast fiber ideal for supercapacitor (~battery) anodes. How does this plant-based epoxy affect conductivity and resistivity in various materials in various outdoor conditions with and without a coating?
If it's plant-based, is it safe next to plenum cable? Can it be used for Hemp structural framing lumber, such as HempWood?
> potential substitutes
When I can order sheets of hemp fiber pre-preg and a recyclable epoxy I’ll get my company to use it same day.
Here I am holding my breathe, because I’m not sure what you heard but an organic fiber will never be as thin, strong, uniform as curated carbon thread that was produced specially for this purpose.
There are Hemp alloys.
From https://motonetworks.com/worlds-greenest-car-somebody-made-c... :
> It’s actually made using hemp fibers that have been woven together and then sealed and finished with as super hard resin. And once it’s completed you have an insanely strong material that makes steel look weak and brittle. It’s reported to be as much as ten times stronger than steel, yet is lighter than fiberglass.
> The Renew Sports Car was recently featured on an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage [...]*
> Dietzen got the idea from none other than Henry Ford who back in 1941 advocated that Ford should build everything they possibly could out of plant material. Which makes sense because that’s obviously going to drastically reduce material costs which should in turn, reduce the overall price of the car. And thanks to modern technology, Dietzen managed to figure out how to make it all work. If this catches on to the mainstream it could revolutionize the automotive industry across the board. He says that it takes roughly 100lbs of cannabis plants to make a car, which sounds like a lot, but when compared to how much steel and other metals used to create current automobiles that’s just a drop in the bucket.
"Is Hemp Really Stronger Than Steel? How?" re: Tensile Strength and Compression Strength exceeded that of {steel, aluminum, } https://hempfoundation.net/is-hemp-really-stronger-than-stee...
Do high carbon steel rockers rust after a couple years of average road salt?
Which carbon fibers are least health-hazardous to produce?
> It’s actually made using hemp fibers that have been woven together and then sealed and finished with as super hard resin. And once it’s completed you have an insanely strong material that makes steel look weak and brittle.
You want to know how you can quickly tell this is all bullshit?
Steel isn’t brittle. Not in any relative sense to composites. Saying something is weak and brittle… that’s dry spaghetti. Does steel failure remind you of that? Or does composite failure seem closer?
Carbon is brittle. Composites are brittle. Hemp with epoxy is going to be brittle,all relative to steel which has plenty of pliability to it.
Are you sure you know enough about composites to repeat these hemp claims? Because if “makes steel look weak and brittle” didn’t immediately flag for you, you either know a lot more than I’ve learned in 20 years of working around composites and manufacturing or you don’t and just want hemp to be cool.
Hemp might be amazing. But you are posting nonsense that it seems like you have some desire to believe for some reason.
Sure maybe it’ll get out of the lab just around the same time graphene does.
Have you here contested claims that hemp - biocomposite with resin - has greater Tensile Strength and Compressive Strength than steel and aluminum (and carbon fiber with sustainable binder)?
If this were OT, we could reference ScholarlyArticles which describe experiments which return scalar intervals for: Tensile and Compressive Strength, Melting point / deployed heat resistance, production cost in real dollars, carbon cost (reduction in carbon tax credits because unnecessary with alternate sustainable inputs), resistance to corrosion due to sodium chloride, [in-space without water] repairability, magnetizability, water transport and filtration cost, and other factors; with a fair standard panel for relative comparison.
Fyi, Fiber Melting points:
Hemp: 150 c
Flax, saline treated: 153 c
Basalt: 1,500 c
Carbon: 3652 c
Ask HN: Is it worth it to learn C to better understand Python?
For those who learned C after learning Python, was it worth it? Did it help you to better understand Python?
In college I used to tutor students in computer science. Mid-way through my college career my school switched the curriculum to teach Python instead of Java. I found that the students who took Python lacked what I considered a basic appreciation for and understanding of how the language actually ‘does’ something.
For instance, when you only need to write two curly braces to create a “dictionary” (of course behind the scenes this is a hash table) many of the nuances of that data structure are hidden from you. You have no idea that accesses are O(1) amortized but worst case are O(n). Even if you do, maybe you don’t understand why. You have no idea that there is reallocation and collision handling code working behind the scenes constantly.
Python also lacks a number of nuances I consider it important to be aware of. You live your entire Python life blissfully unaware that everything is a pointer, and the impact that has on performance. You never come across static typing, or that it is possible to check your code for some level of syntactic correctness before it runs (i.e. Python is interpreted rather than compiled).
I think from this standpoint, it is worth learning a language like C to gain an appreciation for how truly complex a lot of the things Python allows you to do, are. I think that anything which helps you better understand what it is you are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it that way, will make you better at doing that thing.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28709239 :
> From "Ask HN: Is it worth it to learn C in 2020?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878372 : (which discusses [bounded] memory management)
> There are a number of coding guidelines e.g. for safety-critical systems where bounded running time and resource consumption are essential. *These coding guidelines and standards are basically only available for C, C++, and Ada.*
> awesome-safety-critical > Software safety standards: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#so...
> awesome-safety-critical > Coding Guidelines: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#co...
Rancher Desktop 1.0
From https://rancherdesktop.io/ :
> Kubernetes and Container Management on the Desktop:
> An open-source desktop application for Mac, Windows and Linux.
> Rancher Desktop runs Kubernetes and container management on your desktop. You can choose the version of Kubernetes you want to run. You can build, push, pull, and run container images using either containerd or Moby (dockerd). The container images you build can be run by Kubernetes immediately without the need for a registry.
How does Rancher Desktop compare to Docker Desktop in terms of e.g. k8s support?
I think they ship k3s, which is sort if vanilla. It works great in my (limited) experience.
A key point around Rancher Desktop's k8s (actually k3s) support that stands out is that it allows you to use any k3s version and swap between them. This is great for those that want to test their workloads on different k8s versions right on their desktop.
Systemd by Example
This is outstanding... I really wish I would have had this learning systemd as it would have saved me _hours_. Let's be real - a lot of Linux fundamental stuff is still pretty terse. Learning tools like this really smooth it out and optimize how long it takes to wrap your head around a concept. Also, I am a _huge_ advocate for hands-on in regards to retention.
Adding to my favorites and will be passing this on over the years - thank you for such a great resource.
If anything the biggest problem the systemd docs have is verbosity. It's all classic UNIX man pages, a billion pages of detail on every possible setting with no useful examples anywhere. Fortunately the core system is simple enough that the learning curve isn't too steep but I'd really hate to try and learn it from the official docs. They don't even apply CSS to the HTML versions of the docs.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd
Web: https://systemd.io/
Src: https://github.com/systemd/systemd
Systemd manpage index: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.htm... :
man 1 systemd
man systemd
man init
man systemctl
man journalctl
man systemd.timer
man systemd-resolved
Fedora docs > "Understanding and administering systemd" https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/understandin...
RHEL7 System Administrator’s Guide > "Chapter 10. Managing Services with SystemD" https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
This isn't a knock but it's exactly what I was talking about and why I find OP's learning tool to be so valuable.
Lots of folks learn by example and hands-on labs. Personally, I'd much rather learn the basic ropes by jumping into a tool like OP's vs. finding/digging through all of these resources. I'll also criticize to say you likely already know much about systemd, and were able to pull/filter these resources much easier vs someone completely new to the concepts.
To illustrate further: vim is another tool that has outstanding learning resources, everything from very quick "hey get started" examples docs all the way up to adventure games. If I had to go back and relearn vim I would absolutely do it this way vs. digging on man pages like when I was a kid in the 90's. Personally, I learn by doing.
---
Overall - OP's thingy is what I would call a "rich interactive learning tool." It's anecdotal, and obvious projection - but _for me_, interactive learning tools optimize the time it takes to fully "grok" a subject from scratch vs. jumping into a bunch of docs/man pages.
I often find the `## Usage Examples` heading in manages to be most helpful, too.
~Examples as Integration Tests as executable notebooks with output and state assertions may incur less technical debt.
How to manage containers with [MicroShift] k8s/k3d with systemd might be a good example.
Read the Source, Read the Docs, Write the Docs, post the Link to the actual Source of the docs: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/docs/index.md
Systemd man pages source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/tree/main/man
Also https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.mou... https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/man/systemd-mou... :
man systemd.mountWell, we also have a very nice manpage viewer.
I think systemd.directives(7) is an often overlooked manpage.
FWIW, the man.vim vim plugin does grep and some syntax highlighting. https://github.com/vim-utils/vim-man
Pwnkit: Local Privilege Escalation in polkit's pkexec (CVE-2021-4034)
What a glorious little bug. They're trying to scan arguments, and have a loop that starts with (effectively) argv[1]. But if argv is NULL, the loop terminates immediately --- with the maximum argument still set to 1, an out-of-bounds dereference to argv[1] that ends up pointing into the environment. Just beautiful.
I'm surprised that the Linux kernel doesn't prevent execve with argc == 0. I know a lot of programs that would break on that too.
Changing that now would break the core tenet of "never break userspace".
I actually wonder what it could actually break.
argv[0] always exists in normal means, it is either physical path of the executable or soft link position. Without accidents like run a program from code and forget about passing argv. That couldn't happen at all. And in fact, most cross platform program or shell even just assume argv[0] is the same as executable path (and don't give you a option to change it, because it is not possible on all platforms).
I have personally written (lazy) code that calls execve with argv=NULL. So it'd break that.
So, all C/C++ code on {Linux,} but not {OpenBSD,} that handles argc/argv needs to at least just exit() on the conditions added by the like 8 lines in main() in the patch for this issue?: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/commit/a2bf5c...
if (argc < 1) {
exit(126);
}
if (argv[n] == NULL) {
exit(128)
}
// But this could never ever happen?
if (argv == NULL)MicroShift
> Functionally, MicroShift repackages OpenShift core components* into a single binary that weighs in at a relatively tiny 160MB executable (without any compression/optimization).
Sorry, 160meg isn't 'relatively tiny'.
I have many thousands of machines running in multiple datacenters and even getting a ~4mb binary distributed onto them without saturating the network (100mbit) and slowing everything else down, is a bit of a challenge.
Edit: It was just over 4mb using .gz and I recently changed to use xz, which decreased the size by about 1mb and I was excited about that given the scale that I operate at.
> I have many thousands of machines running in multiple datacenters and even getting a ~4mb binary distributed onto them without saturating the network (100mbit) and slowing everything else down, is a bit of a challenge.
Maybe I suggest CAS (Content-addressable storage) or something similar for distributing it instead? I've had good success using torrents for distributing large binaries to a large fleet of servers (that were also in close proximity to each other physically, in clusters with some more distance between them) relatively easily.
Thanks for the suggestion, but as weird as this sounds, we also don't have central servers to use at the data centers for this.
The machines don't all need to be running the same version of the binary at the same time, so I took a simpler approach, which is that each machine checks for updates on a random schedule over a configureable amount of time. This distributes the load evenly and everything becomes eventually consistent. After about an hour everything is updated without issues.
I use CloudFlare workers to cache at the edge. On a push to master, the binary is built in Github CI and a release is made after all the tests pass. There is a simple json file where I can define release channels for a specific version for a specific CIDR (also on a release ci/cd as well, so I can validate the json with tests). I can upgrade/downgrade and test on subsets of machines.
The machines on their random schedule hit the CF worker which checks the cached json file and either returns a 304 or the binary to install depending on the parameters passed in on the query string (current version, ip address, etc.). Binary is downloaded, installed and then it quits and systemd restarts the new version.
Works great.
Notes re: distributed temporal Data Locality, package mirroring, and CAS such as IPFS: "Draft PEP: PyPI cost solutions: CI, mirrors, containers, and caching to scale" (2020) https://groups.google.com/g/pypa-dev/c/Pdnoi8UeFZ8 https://discuss.python.org/t/draft-pep-pypi-cost-solutions-c...
apt-transport-ipfs: https://github.com/JaquerEspeis/apt-transport-ipfs
Gx: https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx
IPFS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/InterPlanetary_File_System
Systemd service sandboxing and security hardening (2020)
This is a pretty lax policy IMHO, you can go much farther. These days I usually start with this, it's much more strict:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976096
Or simply follow whatever `systemd-analyze security` recommends, just make sure you run it on a system with recent systemd.
Which distro has the best out-of-the-box output for:?
systemd-analyze security
https://stopdisablingselinux.com/
> Which distro has the best out-of-the-box output
I haven't seen any difference between distributions with the same systemd version. Anything with a recent one should do fine. More recent than RHEL8, mind you (which is on systemd 239): for example, a syscall allow/deny analysis is buggy there and asks you to enable some protections, and then disable them. The same unit is analyzed correctly on my desktop with v250 (I use the popular rolling release distribution).
I haven't seen anything like audit2allow. It's probably not especially necessary because of the difference in philosophies: SELinux is deny by default, while in systemd you're playing whack-a-mole anyway, and are expected to add directives one by one until the application stops working. Unit logs usually make it obvious if something was denied.
The usual way I've seen (and do myself) is to just let the process be killed and have its coredump taken, then `coredumpctl gdb $process_name -A '-ex "print $rax" -ex "quit"'` to get the syscall number, then check `systemd-analyze syscall-filter` for whether I want to allow just that one syscall or the whole group it's in.
> The usual way I've seen (and do myself) is to just let the process be killed and have its coredump taken, then `coredumpctl gdb $process_name -A '-ex "print $rax" -ex "quit"'` to get the syscall number, then check `systemd-analyze syscall-filter` for whether I want to allow just that one syscall or the whole group it's in.
Another approach would be to set SystemCallLog= to be the opposite of SystemCallFilter= (negate each group with ~) and then you'll see the call (and caller) in the journal.
FWIU, e.g. sysdig is justified atop whichever MAC system.
In the SELinux MAC system on RHEL and Debian, in /etc/config/selinux, you have SELINUXTYPE=minimal|targeted|mls. RHEL (CentOS and Rocky Linux) and Fedora have SELINUXTYPE=targeted out-of-the-box. The compiled rulesets in /etc/selinux/targeted are generated when [...].
With e.g gnome-system-monitor on a machine with SELINUX=permissive|enforcing, you can right-click the column header in the process table to also display the 'Security context' column that's also visible with e.g. `ps -Z`. The stopdisablingselinux video is a good SELinux tutorial.
I'm out of date on Debian/Ubuntu's policy set, which could also probably almost just be sed'ed from the current RHEL policy set.
> * SELinux is deny by default, while in systemd you're playing whack-a-mole anyway, and are expected to add directives one by one until the application stops working. Unit logs usually make it obvious if something was denied.*
DENY if not unconfined is actually the out-of-the-box `targeted` config on RHEL and Fedora. For example, Firefox and Chrome currently run as unconfined processes. While decent browsers do do their own process sandboxing, SELinux and/or AppArmor and/or 'containers' with a shared X socket file (and drop-privs and setcap and cgroups and namespaces fwtw) are advisable atop really any process sandboxing?
Given that the task is to generate a hull of rules that allow for the observed computational workload to complete with least-privileges, if you enable like every rule and log every process hitting every rung on the way down while running integration tests that approximate the workload, you should end up with enough rule violations in the log to even dumbly generate a rule/policy set without the application developer's expertise around to advise on potential access violations to allow.
From https://github.com/draios/sysdig :
> "Sysdig instruments your physical and virtual machines at the OS level by installing into the Linux kernel and capturing system calls and other OS events. Sysdig also makes it possible to create trace files for system activity, similarly to what you can do for networks with tools like tcpdump and Wireshark.
Probably also worth mentioning: "[BETA] Auditing Sysdig Platform Activities" https://docs.sysdig.com/en/docs/developer-tools/beta-auditin...
A bit of SELinux:
# /etc/selinux/config
SELINUXTYPE=targeted
SELINUX=permissive
$# touch /.autorelabel # `restorecon /` at boot
$# reboot
$# setenforce 1 # redundant
$ sudo aureport --avc
$ journalctl --system -u auditd
$ journalctl --system -o json-seq --reverse
$ journalctl --system --grep "AVC" --reverse
journalctl -fa _TRANSPORT=audit
journalctl -fa _TRANSPORT=audit --grep AVC
journalctl -a _TRANSPORT=audit --grep 'AVC avc: denied' -o json | pyline -m json 'json.dumps(json.loads(l), indent=2, sort_keys=True)'Why isn't there a universal data format for résumés?
Looks like there's an hresume microformat but https://schema.org/Person and https://schema.org/Occupation are probably the way to mark up resumes as JSONLD.
From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51315725/resume-work-his... :
> Schema.org's Occupation example 4, illustrates how to use Role and hasOccupation to associate an array of work history, like so:
There's already a https://schema.org/JobPosting .
LAN-port-scan forbidder, browser addon to protect private network
And also "Private Network Access: introducing preflights" (2022) https://developer.chrome.com/blog/private-network-access-pre...
> Chrome is deprecating direct access to private network endpoints from public websites as part of the Private Network Access (PNA) specification.
> Chrome will start sending a CORS preflight request ahead of any private network request for a subresource, which asks for explicit permission from the target server. This preflight request will carry a new header, `Access-Control-Request-Private-Network: true`, and the response to it must carry a corresponding header, `Access-Control-Allow-Private-Network: true`
> The aim is to protect users from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks targeting routers and other devices on private networks. These attacks have affected hundreds of thousands of users, allowing attackers to redirect them to malicious servers.
What would a browser setting to just block all PWA requests (`DENY * TO *` (to {192.168.0.1, .1.1, .100.1,}) - regardless of the appropriate new HTTP headers - actually prevent a normal user from doing?
Ask HN: What are the best books for professional effectiveness?
What books have helped you be more effective at work that apply to most “knowledge work” jobs?
Getting Things Done by David Allen was very helpful to me. It's barely a book - if you skim over the cruft it's more like a pamphlet. I don't follow it religiously but some of his ideas have made a big difference in my productivity.
There's a flowchart of the GTD procedures with something like standard flowchart symbols in [1] PDF, [2] Search query (/?) [3] PNG / MP4 gif. But not yet a meme MP4 GIF, FWIU.
Given that URLs are the workflow improvement of the web, watch if these citations is most useful to you?
1: Heylighen, Francis, and Clément Vidal. "Getting things done: the science behind stress-free productivity." Long Range Planning 41, no. 6 (2008): 585-605.
2: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=Get...
3: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Francis-Heylighen/publi...
6: https://westurner.github.io/wiki/workflow
5: https://github.com/westurner/wiki/blob/master/workflow.rest
5 is editable by the author in their - the original - fork; which may include local and remote branches that Pull Requests and ("#DevOpsSec") Continuous Integration build task automation that help collaborators collaborate on [open source] software in free public git repos.
HTTP Message Signatures
Is this intended to include the featureset of Signed HTTP Exchanges (SXG) as well?
I was wondering how much overlap the two technologies have too.
What I'd really like to see supported is a way for a web app to specify a public key and a version number, and for the browser to then prompt you every subsequent time you access that page if the key or version number has changed. This would effectively allow web apps to use the same security model as desktop apps, i.e. TOFU.
Arguably, though, auto-updating desktop apps are less secure than even TOFU, but I don't know users can be expected to judge whether v1.2.3 is more secure than v1.2.2, so perhaps the prompt doesn't provide any practical benefit.
Is this solveable by including a cache key in the URL or other client-side storage?
Well, there is the SecureBookmarks trick[0], which uses integrity hashes and Data URLs, so you're right that signatures aren't strictly needed (especially at the HTTP level). I think the difficult part is the UX, and how to handle the failure modes, which is why browsers might reasonably be reluctant to support something like this.
Are there additional HTTP status code-like error codes that need to be specified?
What [same origin, SXG,] failure modes are there?
From "HTTP 402: Payment Required" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22214156 :
> The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least.
> https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
The failure modes I was imagining are things like what happens if you visit a site and it is no longer serving signed content any more, or it's serving content signed by a key you haven't seen before? Either the user needs to be able to decide (based on information received out-of-band) which keys to trust, or you have to trust a site to never lose control of its keys (which reintroduces all the problems of HPKP, like ransoming).
Even in the happy path, there are questions of how you present to the user that the content has been signed (and by which key), separately from the guarantees that the TLS transport gives. Does there need to be a UI for viewing the key details, and for approving/rejecting upgrades to the web app?
You said HPKP and I misread it
Re: HKP, WKD, GPG Linked Data signatures, Keybase+Zoom and ACME https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-28814802
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-26127879
Ctrl-F "trillian" re: CT cert grant and revocation events on a blockchain
> Does there need to be a UI for viewing the key details, and for approving/rejecting upgrades to the web app?
blockcerts/cert-verifier-js ?
> Does there need to be a UI for viewing the key details, and for approving/rejecting upgrades to the web app?
There do need to be standards for displaying such errors and requesting key verification in the browser. e.g. DNSSEC and DoH/DoT errors should also propagate up to the browser eh? How do web3 browsers handle keychains?
https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js#...
From (an obscure comment with pictures on) "Roadmap update for TUF support " https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/issues/5247#issuecomment-9... :
> Only users with package release permissions can create a new SoftwareRelease record for that project
You can log hashes to sigstore now, which is a centralized db supported by The Linux Foundation. https://sigstore.dev/ :
> How sigstore works: sigstore is a set of tools developers, software maintainers, package managers and security experts can benefit from. Bringing together free-to-use open source technologies like Fulcio, Cosign and Rekor, it handles digital signing, verification and checks for provenance needed to make it safer to distribute and use open source software.
> A standardized approach: This means that open source software uploaded for distribution has a stricter, more standardized way of checking who’s been involved, that it hasn’t been tampered with. There’s no risk of key compromise, so third parties can’t hijack a release and slip in something malicious.
> Building for future integrations: With the help of a working partnership that includes Google, the Linux Foundation, Red Hat and Purdue University, we’re in constant collaboration to find new ways to improve the sigstore technology, to make it easy to adopt, integrate and become a long-lasting standard.
But then DIDs and ld-proofs (with at least the current trust root in a trustless DLT of some sort) are even more standardized.
Software Releases, [Academic, Professional, Medical,] Credentials, Legal Documents, Server Certs, ScholarlyArticles: all of these things can be signed and may already be listed in the Use Cases documents for W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers [1] and W3C VC Verifiable Credentials [2] which are summarized in context to Keybase here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814802
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-use-cases/
Notably: DNSSEC errors do not propagate up to the browser; when DNSSEC fails, sites simply fall off the Internet as if they never existed. It's a major fault of the DNSSEC design.
Unfortunately, because all domains don't yet have DNSSEC DNS records, a strict resolver that requires DNSSEC signatures will fall to resolve all domains unless it's configured to e.g. "allow-downgrade" to non-DNSSEC-signed records for any lookup.
FWIR, the same is basically true of DoH and DoT: if it's not configured to ~allow-downgrade, DNS will fall to resolve when connected to e.g. a captive portal hotspot; and there's no indication that DoH/DoT aren't working in the browser.
How do DNS resolution APIs need to change to accommodate basic DNSSEC and DoH/DoT error handling?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543911 :
```
From https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-signed-exchanges/ :
> The broader implication of SXGs is that they make content portable: content delivered via an SXG can be easily distributed by third parties while maintaining full assurance and attribution of its origin. Historically, the only way for a site to use a third party to distribute its content while maintaining attribution has been for the site to share its SSL certificates with the distributor. This has security drawbacks. Moreover, it is a far stretch from making content truly portable.
> In the long-term, truly portable content can be used to achieve use cases like fully offline experiences. In the immediate term, the primary use case of SXGs is the delivery of faster user experiences by providing content in an easily cacheable format. Specifically, Google Search will cache and sometimes prefetch SXGs. For sites that receive a large portion of their traffic from Google Search, SXGs can be an important tool for delivering faster page loads to users.
> It’s also possible that all sites could eventually support this standard. Every time a site is loaded, all the linked articles could be pre-loaded. Web speeds across the board would be dramatically increased.
"Signed HTTP Exchanges" draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...
"Bundled HTTP Exchanges" draft-yasskin-wpack-bundled-exchanges https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-wpack-bundle... :
> Web bundles provide a way to bundle up groups of HTTP responses, with the request URLs and content negotiation that produced them, to transmit or store together. They can include multiple top-level resources with one identified as the default by a primaryUrl metadata, provide random access to their component exchanges, and efficiently store 8-bit resources.
From https://web.dev/web-bundles/ :
> Introducing the Web Bundles API. A Web Bundle is a file format for encapsulating one or more HTTP resources in a single file. It can include one or more HTML files, JavaScript files, images, or stylesheets.
> Web Bundles, more formally known as Bundled HTTP Exchanges, are part of the Web Packaging proposal.
> HTTP resources in a Web Bundle are indexed by request URLs, and can optionally come with signatures that vouch for the resources. Signatures allow browsers to understand and verify where each resource came from, and treats each as coming from its true origin. This is similar to how Signed HTTP Exchanges, a feature for signing a single HTTP resource, are handled.
```
Asmrepl: REPL for x86 Assembly Language
This could be implemented with Jupyter notebooks as a Jupyter kernel or maybe with just fancy use of explicitly returned objects that support the (Ruby-like, implicit) IPython.display.display() magic.
IRuby is the Jupyter kernel for Rubylang:
iruby/display: https://github.com/SciRuby/iruby/blob/master/lib/iruby/displ...
iruby/formatter: https://github.com/SciRuby/iruby/blob/master/lib/iruby/forma...
More links to how Jupyter kernels and implicit display() and DAP: Debug Adapter Protocol work: "Evcxr: A Rust REPL and Jupyter Kernel" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25923123
"ENH: Mixed Python/C debugging (GDB,)" https://github.com/jupyterlab/debugger/issues/284
... "Ask HN: How did you learn x86-64 assembly?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23930335
On yak shaving and <md-block>, a new HTML element for Markdown
Oh dear. Markdown has no standard grammar or standard way of rendering.
This website lags while I scroll on mobile.
I remember when the internet used to be fast and responsive. Probably just getting old.
there is the commonmark specification https://spec.commonmark.org/0.30/
I work a lot with common mark and hoedown for work. There's no formal Grammer for parsing markdown unfortunately. The closest thing to what the parent comment is talking about is pandoc which most people are afraid of because Haskell is scary and the markdown format they use is strange.
Also all of the parsers for md are very complicated.
Jupyter-book depends upon MyST-NB (MyST Notebooks) which depends upon myst-parser which depends upon markdown-it-py (which is a port of markdown-it (TypeScript)) for parsing [MyST] Markdown.
https://github.com/executablebooks/myst-parser :
> MyST is a rich and extensible flavor of Markdown meant for technical documentation and publishing.
> MyST is a flavor of markdown that is designed for simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility. This repository serves as the reference implementation of MyST Markdown, as well as a collection of tools to support working with MyST in Python and Sphinx. It contains an extended CommonMark-compliant parser using markdown-it-py, as well as a Sphinx extension that allows you to write MyST Markdown in Sphinx.
https://github.com/executablebooks/markdown-it-py :
> Follows the CommonMark spec for baseline parsing; Configurable syntax: you can add new rules and even replace existing ones; Pluggable: Adds syntax extensions to extend the parser (see the plugin list), High speed (see our benchmarking tests) ; Safe by default
https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it :
> Follows the CommonMark spec + adds syntax extensions & sugar (URL autolinking, typographer), Configurable syntax!; You can add new rules and even replace existing ones; High speed; Safe by default; Community-written plugins and other packages on npm
Thoughts on “E-Readers” (2009)
> But MOST importantly the way the user interacts with the interface would re-create the ease of use rendered by our interaction with print media. This last part, about the user interface, is why I believe Apple is best positioned to tackle this problem.
> In one year's time we'll see. 2010 should be the year paper learns of it's destiny, the year we reach a tipping point on our way towards bits from the momentum of atoms.
This is of course a prescient prediction of the iPad. But what it also reminded me of is a device that had already been shown publicly at the time: The Microsoft Courier.
Microsoft was working on a dual-screen tablet that was essentially a notebook in computer form, complete with custom OS.[1] In the end it never happened.
But I think why this hasn't happened (although there are a few color e-ink devices available from Chinese companies) is that the B&W e-ink devices like the Kindle handle reading normal books just fine. The only cases where color would really be needed would be for comic books, art books, and to some extent scientific papers with color figures.
Small monochrome e-readers are great for reading pure text, e.g fiction.
But they’re quite hopeless for textbooks with lots of images/diagrams/tables and more complex layout. Zooming and scrolling is hopeless on an e-ink screen.
That's why we don't use ink devices for those kinds of documents. I have a range of tools that I use for various use cases. In depth reading fiction - Kindle. Casual browsing of large documents with complex layouts and images - iPad. Working on documents - laptop/desktop.
I would almost never mix linear reading with those other kinds of documents so I don't need devices that handle both kinds of documents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_tablet
> The Adam is set to be the first Android device marketed to contain Pixel Qi's low-power, dual-mode display
Was it that there wasn't a market for Pixel Qi dual-mode displays?
IDK how well you can scroll a (monochrome) PDF textbook on a PineNote development unit yet, given that the eInk display driver didn't work yet last I heard. https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/high-end-e-i...
Nobody reads the whole PDF on even a large phone in landscape mode. There's a new server-side liquid PDF reflowing solution that could help solve the fixed font sizes and margin issues on mobile devices. ePub is basically just HTML, by comparison. But certain walled gardens feel like it's necessary to convert epub to mobi, rather than just integrate one of a number of existing open source e-reader apps with support for multiple document, eBook, and textbook formats.
Ask HN: Why don’t startups share their cap table and/or shares outstanding?
Start-ups expect you to join as the 4th employee, work incredibly hard for years and not have a clear picture of your compensation? Am I meant to take a 409a valuation at face value?
Is there a legal reason? If not, founders who are hiring, please know that withholding information like this is the easiest way to lose a potential hire.
From "Ask HN: Cap Table Service Recommendations" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044479 :
> Here are the "409a valuation" reviews on FounderKit: https://founderkit.com/legal/409a-valuation/reviews
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_table
And from "Stock dilution" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_dilution :
> Stock dilution, also known as equity dilution, is the decrease in existing shareholders' ownership percentage of a company as a result of the company issuing new equity.[1] New equity increases the total shares outstanding which has a dilutive effect on the ownership percentage of existing shareholders. This increase in the number of shares outstanding can result from a primary market offering (including an initial public offering), employees exercising stock options, or by issuance or conversion of convertible bonds, preferred shares or warrants into stock. This dilution can shift fundamental positions of the stock such as ownership percentage, voting control, earnings per share, and the value of individual shares.
It is reasonable for shareholders to request - in dated written form - Transparency with What-If scenarios for "let's just issue more shares to raise capital".
From "Ask HN: Value of “Shares of Stock options” when joining a startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19789785 :
> There are a number of options/equity calculators:
> https://tldroptions.io/ ("~65% of companies will never exit", "~15% of companies will have low exits", "~20% of companies will make you money")*
> https://comp.data.frontapp.com/ "Compensation and Equity Calculator"
> http://optionsworth.com/ "What are my options worth?"
> http://foundrs.com/ "Co-Founder Equity Calculator"
From foundrs:
> The equity numbers assume a typical 4-year vesting for all founders including the CEO, with no cliff. It also assumes that no significant salary is provided to any of the co-founders (if that is wrong, you are entering into an employee relationship, not a co-founder relationship). If a founder leaves, vesting applies and they forfeit the shares that have not vested yet.
Vesting > Ownership in startup companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesting#Ownership_in_startup_c...
Toxiproxy is a framework for simulating network conditions
I wrote the initial version of Toxiproxy back in 2014, but Jacob Wirth took it way beyond during his internship at Shopify. It came out of a need for writing integration tests for resiliency work we did at Shopify back then. [1] We didn't want someone to suddenly re-introduce a hard dependency on e.g. Redis on Shopify's storefronts. The initial prototype was a shell script that used lsof(1) and gdb(1) to close the file descriptor of the various connections. But, besides being dodgy, we needed to also simulate latency and make sure it worked on everyone's MacOS laptop's (otherwise e.g. tc(1) would have been intriguing). I wrote a little bit more of the history of Toxiproxy on Twitter. [2] It's stable and has proxied everything in dev and CI at Shopify for over half a decade.
[1]: https://shopify.engineering/building-and-testing-resilient-r...
[2]: https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/1455622640727728137
What a useful tool for resilience engineering.
https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-chaos-engineering#notab... does list toxiproxy.
Any general pointers for handling network connectivity issues (from any OSI layer) in client and server apps?
Many apps lack 'pending in outbox' functionality that we expect from e.g. email clients.
- [ ] Who could develop a set of reference toxiproxy 'test case mutators' (?) for simulating typical #DisasterRelief connectivity issues?
(In Python, Pytest + Hypothesis + Toxiproxy-python would be useful.)
Report on Stablecoins [pdf]
It may not be immediately obvious that all banks run their own "stablecoin": LD: "Ledger Dollars". How do "internal bank ledger dollars" differ from stablecoins?
As well, very many countries of the world "peg" their currency to the USD.
From https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency-peg.asp :
> Countries will experience a particular set of problems when a currency is pegged at an overly low exchange rate. On the one hand, domestic consumers will be deprived of the purchasing power to buy foreign goods. Suppose that the Chinese yuan is pegged too low against the U.S. dollar. Then, Chinese consumers will have to pay more for imported food and oil, lowering their consumption and standard of living. On the other hand, the U.S. farmers and Middle East oil producers who would have sold them more goods lose business. This situation naturally creates trade tensions between the country with an undervalued currency and the rest of the world.
> Another set of problems emerges when a currency is pegged at an overly high rate. A country may be unable to defend the peg over time. Since the government set the rate too high, domestic consumers will buy too many imports and consume more than they can produce. These chronic trade deficits will create downward pressure on the home currency, and the government will have to spend foreign exchange reserves to defend the peg. The government's reserves will eventually be exhausted, and the peg will collapse.
> When a currency peg collapses, the country that set the peg too high will suddenly find imports more expensive. That means inflation will rise, and the nation may also have difficulty paying its debts. The other country will find its exporters losing markets, and its investors losing money on foreign assets that are no longer worth as much in domestic currency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exchange_...
Is this the game:
(A USD / B USD) * X = (C LD / D LD)
Perhaps "All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization" could be updated to indicate which of the depicted assets are stablecoins and which are derivatives? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...
Are there some historical examples of centralized economic planning resulting in currency devaluation and subsequent directly resultant unrest?
Intel Extension for Scikit-Learn
https://github.com/intel/scikit-learn-intelex
CuML is similar to Intel Extension for Scikit-Learn in function? https://github.com/rapidsai/cuml
> cuML is a suite of libraries that implement machine learning algorithms and mathematical primitives functions that share compatible APIs with other RAPIDS projects. cuML enables data scientists, researchers, and software engineers to run traditional tabular ML tasks on GPUs without going into the details of CUDA programming. In most cases, cuML's Python API matches the API from scikit-learn. For large datasets, these GPU-based implementations can complete 10-50x faster than their CPU equivalents. For details on performance, see the cuML Benchmarks Notebook.
The Metaverse Was Lame Even Before Facebook
Weren't BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) lame before Facebook, too?
BBS > List of features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
Metaverse > History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
TIL there's a VR version of Flight Simulator 2020 and it has the best Earth model of any game. Is that a metaverse? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_(20...
> Flight Simulator simulates the topography of the entire Earth using data from Bing Maps. Microsoft Azure's artificial intelligence (AI) generates the three-dimensional representations of Earth's features, using its cloud computing to render and enhance visuals, and real-world data to generate real-time weather and effects. Flight Simulator has a physics engine to provide realistic flight control surfaces, with over 1,000 simulated surfaces, as well as realistic wind modelled over hills and mountains
AFAIU, e.g. Microsoft Planetary Computer data is not yet integrated into any Virtual Game World Metaverses? An in-game focus on real world sustainability would help us understand that online worlds are very much connected to the real world. https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/applications
https://github.com/TomAugspurger/scalable-sustainability-pyd... describes how that can be done with Python code.
You are being downvoted but I agree with your point. Just because past attempts at something were “lame” does not mean the next attempt will be lame. You could just as well say that smartphones were lame before the iPhone. After all, Nokia had Symbian smartphones for some time. HTC had Windows Mobile smartphones with a touchscreen before the iPhone. But when the iPhone happened, everything fell into place and it changed the world. I am a massive skeptic of the meta verse concept, and definitely wary of any big technology company having a lot of influence/control over it (particularly Facebook). But I also don’t think a backwards-looking retrospective on something that hasn’t been done before in the same way is useful or a convincing dismissal.
Is college worth it? A return-on-investment analysis
It makes my flesh crawl to see college reduced purely to ROI, but at least they're honest that that's what they're doing.
I just hope people at least consider all of the other "outputs" of going to college when reading something like this. The ROI analysis is good data, it answers an important question. But there are many, many other important questions worth answering. (And most of them aren't quantifiable, so it's not like you could do a study on them if you wanted to.)
College can be an awful experience for some people even if they end up making good money. And it can be an excellent life experience for people who end up making dirt. I got lucky -- I had a great experience, I learned a lot of important non-academic things, I broke out of my shell, and it's pretty directly responsible for a large portion of my earnings. (And yes, the numbers for my university and major from the study match my current income and age quite well.)
But now I have a kid in high school, and I'm facing all the questions about what futures to keep open and what ones to sacrifice in the service of others. College is much more expensive now. My family was dirt poor and so I had massive financial aid; any financial aid my kid gets will have to be merit-based. Degree inflation has sucked away a lot of the value of having a degree. I can afford to support a less secure (low-risk) path through life if I think it would be better for my kid as a human being. These are not easy questions to be facing.
Increasingly I see the idea of thinking of college in any other terms as a deliberate meme designed to make people pay extremely high prices and put them in a debt trap, and that the sources of that meme like it that way.
Before college can be creating well-rounded citizenry or provide "excellent life experiences" or any of the other things people want of it, it must first provide a good ROI. This is a necessary foundation. If it is not doing that, then all the other fancy things are merely digging the debt trap in deeper because you're paying for all these things while failing to obtain a method of paying them back.
As a culture, in decades past we were used to college generally being so cheap that providing a good ROI wasn't that big a deal. It's much easier to get a good ROI out of something cheap. So we focused on the higher layers and were able to neglect the fact that the higher layers were always built on a foundation of the fact that college in general was a good ROI. Consequently we have come to misinterpret those higher level things as the purpose of college.
But it is necessary that these aspirational benefits be setting on a good foundation of good ROI to not be abusive to the customer.
It is not and must not be considered some sort of betrayal to be worried about ROI for college. It must simply be seen as an understanding of the fact that as the costs have changed, the way we must analyze college has also changed. It was always true, it's just now it has manifested in a larger way.
College wouldn’t need to provide a good roi if it were much mess expensive. Just like, strictly speaking, going to a movie doesn’t provide a good roi.
It’s one thing to take four years of your life deepening your thinking ability and stretching your mind without a good roi if you come out the other end without crushing debt and prospects for employment that can sustain you, even if those prospects have nothing to do with your college experience. This is what college was like until the last four decades or so.
It’s entirely another to come out the other side in crippling debt and no prospects for any kind of sustaining job.
If it provides the same value, but costs less, then by definition, the ROI is better. OTOH, if it puts you in crippling debt, but you have no prospects of a job to support that - the ROI becomes bad or even negative. So doesn't it capture all of that already?
In some sense, twice the cost for twice the benefit might be worth it to those who can afford it, because the time-wise investment (4 years or so of your life) remain constant.
No, it doesn't capture all of that already.
A "better" ROI doesn't necessarily mean a positive ROI.
Getting negative 10% return on a $1,000 investment doesn't matter as much as getting a negative 10% return on a $100,000 investment.
Magnitude certainly is relevant to vector comparisons; but, if we define ROI as nominal rate of return, gross returns are not relevant to a comparison by that metric.
Return on Investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(mathematics_and_physic... :
> A Euclidean vector is thus an equivalence class of directed segments with the same magnitude (e.g., the length of the line segment (A, B)) and same direction (e.g., the direction from A to B).[3] In physics, Euclidean vectors are used to represent physical quantities that have both magnitude and direction, but are not located at a specific place, in contrast to scalars, which have no direction.[4] For example, velocity, forces and acceleration are represented by vectors
Quantitatively and Qualitatively quantify the direct and external benefits of {college, other alternatives} with criteria in additional to real monetary ROI?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics
> Welfare economics also provides the theoretical foundations for particular instruments of public economics, including cost–benefit analysis,
Except that the grandparent post that you responded to was all about the magnitude of the loss rather than just ROI. If the magnitude of the loss is manageable, then the ROI becomes less important for life decisions.
So sure! If all we are looking at is ROI then you are right! By definition! As long as you restrict your refutation ("by that metric") in a way that ignores the additional metric I had been trying to add to the conversation. I was trying to point out that there are other metrics that matter.
Direct or External Loss?
Is the unique loss you identify not accounted for in the traditional ROI expression?
[deleted]
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18833730 :
>> Why would people make an investment with insufficient ROI (Return on Investment)?
> Insufficient information.
> College Scorecard [1] is a database with a web interface for finding and comparing schools according to a number of objective criteria. CollegeScorecard launched in 2015. It lists "Average Annual Cost", "Graduation Rate", and "Salary After Attending" on the search results pages. When you review a detail page for an institution, there are many additional statistics; things like: "Typical Total Debt After Graduation" and "Typical Monthly Loan Payment".
> The raw data behind CollegeScorecard can be downloaded from [2]. The "data_dictionary" tab of the "Data Dictionary" spreadsheet describes the data schema.
> [1] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
> [2] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
> Khan Academy > "College, careers, and more" [3] may be a helpful supplement for funding a full-time college admissions counselor in a secondary education institution
> [3] https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/college-adm... :
- [ ] Video & exercise / Jupyter notebook under Exploring college options for Return on Investment (according to e.g. CollegeScorecard data)
Notes from the Meeting on Python GIL Removal Between Python Core and Sam Gross
Just came in here briefly to opine that there is a very real risk of fork if the Python core community does not at least offer a viable alternative expediently.
The economic pressures surrounding the benefits of gross’s changes will likely influence this more than any tears shed over subtle backwards incompatibility.
I believe it was Dropbox that famously released their own private internal Python build a while back and included some concurrency patches.
Many teams might go the route of working from Sam Gross’ work and if we see subtle changes in underlying runtime concurrency semantics or something else backwards incompatible that’s it- either that adoption will roll downhill to a new standard or Python core will have to answer with a suitable GIL-less alternative.
I for one do not want to think about “ANSI Python” runtimes or give the MSFTs etc of the world an opening to divide the user base.
> I believe it was Dropbox that famously released their own private internal Python build a while back and included some concurrency patches.
Google also had their Unladen Swallow version, but it seems they lost interest at some point.
"PEP 3146 -- Merging Unladen Swallow into CPython" > Future Work (2010) https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/#future-work
Perhaps Google/Grumpy could be updated to compile Python 3.x+ to Go with e.g. the RustPython version of the CPython Python Standard Library modules?
"Inside cpyext: Why emulating CPython C API is so Hard" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040664
Today, conda-forge compiles CPython to relocatable platform+architecture-specific binaries with LLVM. https://github.com/conda-forge/python-feedstock/blob/master/...
conda-forge also compiles PyPy Python to relocatable platform+architecture-specific binaries with LLVM. conda-forge/pypy3.6-feedstock (3.7) https://github.com/conda-forge/pypy3.6-feedstock/blob/master...
https://github.com/conda-forge/pypy-meta-feedstock/blob/mast... :
> summary: Metapackage to select pypy as python implementation
Pyodide (JupyterLite) compiles CPython to WASM (or LLVM IR?) with LLVM/emscripten IIRC. Hopefully there's a clear way to implement the new GIL-less multithreading support with Web Workers in WASM, too?
The https://rapids.ai/ org has a bunch a fast Python for HPC and Cloud; with Dask and pick a scheduler. Less process overhead and less need for interprocess locking of memory handles that transgress contexts due to a new GIL removal approach would be even faster than debuggable one process per core Python.
Grumpy is unmaintained.There is similar work (py2many) that transpiles python3 to 8 different languages.
The approach focuses on functional programming, does away with extensions completely.
For that approach to be successful, a pure python implementation of stdlib in the transpileable subset of python 3 would be super helpful.
Show HN: OtterTune – Automated Database Tuning Service for RDS MySQL/Postgres
Yo. OtterTune is a database optimization service. It uses machine learning to automatically tune your MySQL and Postgres configuration (i.e., RDS parameter groups) to improve performance and reduce costs. It does this by only looking at your database's runtime metrics (e.g., INNODB_METRICS, pg_stat_database, CloudWatch). We don't need to examine sensitive queries or user tables. We spun this project out of my research group at Carnegie Mellon University in 2020.
This week we've announced that OtterTune is now available to the public. We are offering everyone a starter account to try it out on their Postgres RDS or MySQL RDS databases (all versions, AWS US AZs only). We have seen OtterTune achieve 2-4x performance improvements and 50% cost reductions for these databases compared to using Amazon's default RDS configuration.
I am happy to answer any questions that you may have about how OtterTune works here.
-- Andy
================
More Info:
* 5min Demo Video: https://ottertune.com/blog/ottertune-explained-in-five-minutes
* Free Account Sign-up: https://ottertune.com/try
I know this Show HN is about RDS specifically, but the site suggests this works elsewhere, too; any issues with pointing OtterTune at DBs making heavy use of extensions (e.g. Timescale, Citus) or nonstandard deployment approaches (k8s, patroni, vitess)?
We have deployed OtterTune for on-prem databases (baremetal, containers). But we are not offering that to everyone right now because organizations manage their configurations for these deployments in a bunch of different ways (Github actions, Chef/Puppet, Terraform). The nice thing about RDS is that they have a single API for updating configurations (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_...).
As for the Postgres-derivates that you mentioned (Timescale, Citus), we have not tested OtterTune for them yet. But there is no reason they shouldn't also work because they expose the same metrics API (pg_stat_database) and config knobs. There are just way more people using Postgres (RDS, Aurora), so we are focusing on them right now.
What about OpenStack Trove DBaaS? OpenStack Trove is like an open source self-hosted Amazon RDS or Google CloudSQL. https://docs.openstack.org/trove/latest/
FWIU, Trove supports 10+ databases including MySQL and PostgreSQL.
AFAIU, there are sound reasons to host containers with e.g. OpenStack VMs instead of a k8s scheduler with a proper SAN and just figure out how to redundantly and resiliently sync - replicate, synchronize, primary/secondary, nodeprocd - and tune given the CAP theorem and the given DB implementation(s)?
Here's the official Ansible role for Trove, which provisions various e.g. SQL databases on an OpenStack cloud: https://github.com/openstack/openstack-ansible-os_trove
Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
Notably, of those bug reports, fewer than 1% (only 3 bugs) were specific to the Linux version of the game. That is, over 99% of the bugs reported by Linux gamers also affected players in other platforms. Moreover (quoting from the OP):
> The report quality [from Linux users] is stellar. I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed. And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.
Are there any good articles on writing helpful bug reports? Whenever I submit a bug I try to give as much detail and be as specific as possible but I always imagine some dev somewhere reading it rolling their eyes at the unnecessary paragraphs I’ve submitted.
From "Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist" https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19684376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19686470 :
> GitHub and GitLab support task checklists in Markdown and also project boards [...]
> GitHub and GitLab support (multiple) Issue and Pull Request templates:
> Default: /.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md || Configure in web interface
> /.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/Name.md || /.gitlab/issue_templates/Name.md
> Default: /.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md || Configure in web interface
> /.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/Name.md || /.gitlab/merge_request_templates/Name.md
> There are template templates in awesome-github-templates [1] and checklist template templates in github-issue-templates [2].
Arrow DataFusion includes Ballista, which does SIMD and GPU vectorized ops
From the Ballista README:
> How does this compare to Apache Spark? Ballista implements a similar design to Apache Spark, but there are some key differences.
> - The choice of Rust as the main execution language means that memory usage is deterministic and avoids the overhead of GC pauses.
> - Ballista is designed from the ground up to use columnar data, enabling a number of efficiencies such as vectorized processing (SIMD and GPU) and efficient compression. Although Spark does have some columnar support, it is still largely row-based today.
> - The combination of Rust and Arrow provides excellent memory efficiency and memory usage can be 5x - 10x lower than Apache Spark in some cases, which means that more processing can fit on a single node, reducing the overhead of distributed compute.
> - The use of Apache Arrow as the memory model and network protocol means that data can be exchanged between executors in any programming language with minimal serialization overhead.
Previous article from when Ballista was a separate repo from arrow-datafusion: "Ballista: Distributed compute platform implemented in Rust using Apache Arrow" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25824399
Parsing gigabytes of JSON per second
The project described in the paper is https://simdjson.org/.
Source: https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/pysimdjson/
There's a rust port: https://github.com/simd-lite/simd-json
... From ijson https://pypi.org/project/ijson/#id3 which supports streaming JSON:
> Ijson provides several implementations of the actual parsing in the form of backends located in ijson/backends: [yajl2_c, yajl2_cffi, yajl2, yajl, python]
Fed to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks
The relatively low salaries compared to the huge amounts of power is almost begging for insider trading, influence peddling, etc.
> The salary of a Congress member varies based on the job title of the congressman or senator. Most senators, representatives, delegates and the resident commissioner from Puerto Rico make a salary of $174,000 per year.
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/congressman-...
Then again, some people have near insatiable greed and even at a $1M/year salary, some would be looking for ways to further boost their income at the boundaries of ethics, or beyond.
This is about the Fed banning it's own policymakers from owning them, not about congress.
Would the Fed actually have the authority to even do that, regulate what securities Congress members are allowed to hold?
“The Fed” as in the Federal Reserve: no.
“The Fed” as in the Federal Government: yes.
"Blind Trust" > "Use by US government officials to avoid conflicts of interest" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_trust
... If you want to help, you must throw all of your startup equity away.
... No, you may not co-brand with that company (which is not complicit with your agenda).
... Besides, I'm not even eligible for duty: you can't hire me.
... Maybe I could be more helpful from competitive private industry.
... How can a government hire prima donna talent like Iron Man?
... Is it criminal to start a solvent, sustainable business to solve government problems, for that one customer?
... Which operations can a government - operating with or without competition - solve most energy-efficiently and thus cost-effectively? Looks like single-payer healthcare and IDK what else?
(Edit)
US Digital Services Playbook: https://github.com/usds/playbook
From https://www.nist.gov/itl/applied-cybersecurity/nice/nice-fra... :
> "NIST Special Publication 800-181 revision 1, the Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework), provides a set of building blocks for describing the tasks, knowledge, and skills that are needed to perform cybersecurity work performed by individuals and teams. Through these building blocks, the NICE Framework enables organizations to develop their workforces to perform cybersecurity work, and it helps learners to explore cybersecurity work and to engage in appropriate learning activities to develop their knowledge and skills.
From "NIST Special Publication 800-181 Revision 1: Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework)" (2020) https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-181r1:
> 3.1 Using Existing Task, Knowledge, and Skill (TKS) Statements
(Edit) FedNOW should - like mCBDC - really consider implementing Interledger Protocol (ILP) for RTGS "Real-Time Gross Settlement" https://interledger.org/developer-tools/get-started/overview...
From https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen... :
> Peering, Clearing and Settling; The Interledger network is a graph of nodes (connectors) that have peered with one another by establishing a means of exchanging ILP packets and a means of paying one another for the successful forwarding and delivery of the packets.
Fed or no, wouldn't you think there'd be money in solving for the https://performance.gov Goals ( https://www.usaspending.gov/ ) and the #GlobalGoals (UN Sustainable Development Goals) -aligned GRI Corporate Sustainability Report? #CSR #ESG #SustyReporting
Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
From "Hemp Wood: A Comprehensive Guide" https://www.buildwithrise.com/stories/hempwood-the-sustainab... :
> HempWood is priced competitively to similar cuts of black walnut. You can purchase 72" HempWood boards for between $13 and $40 as of the date of publishing. HempWood also sells carving blocks, cabinets, and kits to make your own table. Prices for table kits range from $175 to $300. Jul 5, 2021 […]
> Is Hemp Wood Healthy? Due to its organic roots and soy-based adhesive, hemp wood is naturally non-toxic and doesn't contain VOCs, making it a healthier choice for interior building.
> Hemp wood has also been tested to have a decreased likelihood of warping and twisting. Its design is free of any of the knots common in other hardwoods to reduce wood waste.
FWIU, hempcrete - hemp hurds and sustainable limestone - must be framed; possibly with Hemp Wood, which is stronger than spec lumber of the same dimensions.
FWIU, Hemp batting insulation is soaked in sodium to meet code.
Hopefully the production and distribution processes for these carbon sinks keeps net negative carbon in the black.
I want to like hempwood but the price needs to come down. Hopefully it will as production increases.
What are the limits? Input costs, current economy of scale?
Scale, reportedly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qy6awPeric
Investors use AI to analyse CEOs’ language patterns and tone
This might be the best NewsArticle headline on HN I've ever seen.
Why, what does it say? Can you log that in a reproducible Notebook with Docs and Test assertions please?
Or are we talking about maybe a ScholarlyArticle CreativeWork with a https://schema.org/funder property or just name and url.
Graph of Keybase commits pre and post Zoom acquisition
Oh boy. Is it too early to say RIP?
The github repo looks ripe for a fork.
The servers are not FOSS and would need reimplementing.
Likely easy enough for a client based on E2E encryption principles; the backend is in many ways a (fancy) dumb pipe. (It could still require complex infrastructure, but at least there'd be relative little "feature" code on the backend to be rewritten.)
FWIU, Cyph does Open Source E2E chat, files, and unlimited length social posts to circles or to public; but doesn't yet do encrypted git repos that can be solved with something like git-crypt. https://github.com/cyph/cyph
It would be wasteful to throw away the Web of Trust (people with handles to keys) that everyone entered into Keybase. Hopefully, Zoom will consider opening up the remaining pieces of Keybase if not just spinning the product back out to a separate entity?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19185998 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19185998 :
> There's also "Web Key Directory"; which hosts GPG keys over HTTPS from a .well-known URL for a given user@domain identifier: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD
> GPG presumes secure key distribution
> Compared to existing PGP/GPG keyservers [HKP], WKD does rely upon HTTPS.
Blockcerts can be signed when granted to a particular identity entity:
> Here are the open sources of blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer and blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js: https://github.com/blockchain-certificates
CT Certificate Transparency logs for key grants and revocations may depend upon a centralized or a decentralized Merkleized datastore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
How do I specify the correct attributes of my schema.org/Person record (maybe on my JAMstack site) in order to approximate the list of identities that e.g. Keybase lets one register and refer to a cryptographic proof of?
Do I generate a W3C DID and claim my identities by listing them in a JSON-LD document signed with W3C ld-proofs (ld-signatures)? Which of the key directory and Web of Trust features of Keybase are covered by existing W3C spec Use Cases?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28701355:
> "Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/
>> 2. Use Cases: Online shopper, Vehicle assemblies, Confidential Customer Engagement, Accessing Master Data of Entities, Transferable Skills Credentials, Cross-platform User-driven Sharing, Pseudonymous Work, Pseudonymity within a supply chain, Digital Permanent Resident Card, Importing retro toys, Public authority identity credentials (eIDAS), Correlation-controlled Services
> And then, IIUC W3C Verifiable Credentials / ld-proofs can be signed with W3C DID keys - that can also be generated or registered centrally, like hosted wallets or custody services. There are many Use Cases for Verifiable Credentials: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-use-cases/ :
>> 3. User Needs: Education, Retail, Finance, Healthcare, Professional Credentials, Legal Identity, Devices
>> 4. User Tasks: Issue Claim, Assert Claim, Verify Claim, Store / Move Claim, Retrieve Claim, Revoke Claim
>> 5. Focal Use Cases: Citizenship by Parentage, Expert Dive Instructor, International Travel with Minor and Upgrade
>> 6. User Sequences: How a Verifiable Credential Might Be Created, How a Verifiable Credential Might Be Used
Is there an ACME-like thing to verify online identity control like Keybase still does?
Hopefully, Zoom will consider opening up the remaining pieces of Keybase if not just spinning the product back out to a separate entity?
> Is there an ACME-like thing to verify online identity control like Keybase still does?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926739 :
> NIST SP 800-63 https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ :
> SP 800-63-3: Digital Identity Guidelines https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-63-3
> SP 800-63A: Enrollment and Identity Proofing https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-63a
FWIU, NIST SP 800-63A Enrollment and Identity Proofing specifies a spec sort of like ACME but for offline identity.
"Key server (cryptographic)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_server_(cryptographic)
> The last IETF draft for HKP also defines a distributed key server network, based on DNS SRV records: to find the key of someone@example.com, one can ask it by requesting example.com's key server.
> Keyserver examples: These are some keyservers that are often used for looking up keys with `gpg --recv-keys`.[6] These can be queried via https:// (HTTPS) or hkps:// (HKP over TLS) respectively: keys.openpgp.org , pgp.mit.edu , keyring.debian.org , keyserver.ubuntu.com ,
"Linked Data Signatures for GPG" https://gpg.jsld.org/
npm i @transmute/lds-gpg2020 -g
gpg2020 sign -u "3BCAC9A882DEFE703FD52079E9CB06E71794A713" $(pwd)/docs/example/doc.json did:btcr:xxcl-lzpq-q83a-0d5#yubikey
> GpgSignature2020: A JSON-LD Document has been signed with GpgSignature2020, when it contains a proof field with type GpgSignature2020. The proof must contain a key signatureValue with value defined by the signing algorithm described here. Example:
{
"@context": [
"https://gpg.jsld.org/contexts/lds-gpg2020-v0.0.jsonld",
{
"schema": "http://schema.org/",
"name": "schema:name",
"homepage": "schema:url",
"image": "schema:image"
}
],
"name": "Manu Sporny",
"homepage": "https://manu.sporny.org/",
"image": "https://manu.sporny.org/images/manu.png",
"proof": {
"type": "GpgSignature2020",
"created": "2020-02-16T18:21:26Z",
"verificationMethod": "did:web:did.or13.io#20a968a458342f6b1a822c5bfddb584bdf141f95",
"proofPurpose": "assertionMethod",
"signatureValue": "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----\n\niQEzBAABCAAdFiEEIKlopFg0L2sagixb/dtYS98UH5UFAl5JiCYACgkQ/dtYS98U\nH5U8TQf/WS92hXkdkdBQ0xJcaSkoTsGspshZ+lT98N2Dqu6I1Q01VKm+UMniv5s/\n3z4VX83KuO5xtepFjs4S95S4gLmr227H7veUdlmPrQtkGpvRG0Ks5mX7tPmJo2TN\nDwm1imm+zvJ+MXr3Ld24qaRJA9dI+AoZ5HXqNp96Yncj3oWD+DtVIZmC/ZiUw43a\nLpMYy94Hie7Ad86hEoqsdRxrwq7O6KZ29TAKi5T/taemayyXY7papU28mGjVEcvO\na7M3XNBflMcMEB+g6gjrANsgFNO6tOuvOQ2+4v6yMfpJ0ji4ta7q2d4QKqGi5YhE\nsRUORN+7HJrkmSTaT7gBpFQ+YUnyLA==\n=Uzp1\n-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----\n"
}
}Single sign-on: What we learned during our identity alpha
Reading documents like passports with an NFC reader does indeed work, and does indeed produce verifiable material. Specifically the passport has proof (via a digital signature) that it was issued by a specific authority, and in turn, proof that the contents of the passport (name, date of birth, a picture and so on) are as issued.
But, the problem here is that the issuer is the British government, so, what are you proving? "Here, you issued this passport". "Oh yes, so we did". I presume the British government does own a database of the passports they issued, so this isn't news to them.
A modestly smart device, such as a Yubico device, is capable of providing fresh proof of its identity. My Security Key doesn't prove "The security key that enrolled me with GitHub in fact exists" which is redundant - but "I am still the same security key that you enrolled". However the passport can't do that, your passport is inert, and the fact that Sarah Smith existed isn't the thing you presumably want to prove to a single-sign-on service. You want to prove that you are Sarah Smith, something the passport doesn't really do.
I think the GDS ignores this problem, which is to be fair no worse than lots of other systems, but the result isn't actually what it seems to be, all the digital technology isn't actually proving anybody's identity in this space.
It reminds me of the bad old days of the Web PKI where it was found that the "email validation" being used would accept automated "virus checking" of email. A CA sends the "Are you sure you want to issue a cert for mycorp.example?" message to somebody@mycorp.example and even though Somebody is on vacation in Barbados for two weeks, the automatic "virus" check reads the URL out of the email, follows it, ignores the page saying "Success, your certificate has been issued" and passes it to Somebody's inbox... All the "security" is doing what it was designed to do, but, what it was designed to do isn't what it should have been designed to do, and so it's futile.
Isn't there two things going on here? A single sign on service, and also an identity check.
A yubico device can say "I'm still the same security key that was enrolled" but it doesn't say at enrolment "I am being used by Fred Jones of <address> with passport no 123, NiNo ABC".
GDS verify / government gateway do support 'authenticators' (typically password + totp) to provide a level of assurance that the person logging into the account is the person the account belongs to.
The "document check" is part of the identity bit. That is, how confident are we that the person creating this account / performing this action is who they say they are and can do this thing or see that information. The document check is part of their solution but other parts are supposed to layer on top of it to provide a proportionate level of assurance. e.g. a video of you holding up the passport to check that it's you using it or asking you to provide answers to details you already have like 'how much tax did you pay last year' or checking multiple documents.
> I presume the British government does own a database of the passports they issued, so this isn't news to them.
The passport office (part of the Home Office) own that database. Part of this work is basically a web service to that database for the rest of the government to use.
This is the difference between 'identity assurance' (at enrollment) and 'authentication assurance' in the relevant NIST standard, SP 800-63 https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/
A remote passport check might be suitable to claim an identity assurance level of 2, say, while getting to identity assurance level 3 would need an in-person visit with multiple forms of other government identification records.
In that way you might then constrain some actions to be taken remotely only by users who have provided strong assurance of their identity at enrollment (even if they login with strong non-phishable authentication... doesn't matter that the auth is ironclad if the user's identity is muddy).
Thx. NIST SP 800-63* https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/ :
> SP 800-63-3: Digital Identity Guidelines https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-63-3
> SP 800-63A: Enrollment and Identity Proofing https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-63a
> SP 800-63B: Authentication and Lifecycle Management https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-63b
> SP 800-63C: Federation and Assertions https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-63c
Five things we still don’t know about water
Also interesting:
https://sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-eart...
> The Earth has lost a quarter of its water
> In its early history, the Earth's oceans contained significantly more water than they do today. A new study indicates that hydrogen from split water molecules has escaped into space.
But where did the water come from? Neptune? Europa? Comet(s)? Is it just the distance to our nearest star in our habitable zone here that results in liquid water being likely?
From the article:
> But the exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood. The evaporation rate is traditionally represented in terms of a rate of collision between molecules, multiplied by a fudge factor called the evaporation coefficient, which varies between zero and one. Experimental determination of this coefficient, spanning several decades, has varied over three orders of magnitude.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation :
> Evaporation is a type of vaporization that occurs on the surface of a liquid as it changes into the gas phase.[1] The surrounding gas must not be saturated with the evaporating substance. When the molecules of the liquid collide, they transfer energy to each other based on how they collide with each other. When a molecule near the surface absorbs enough energy to overcome the vapor pressure, it will escape and enter the surrounding air as a gas.[2] When evaporation occurs, the energy removed from the vaporized liquid will reduce the temperature of the liquid, resulting in evaporative cooling.[3]
New Optical Switch Up to 1000x Faster Than Transistors
Does this work at normal temperatures? Or does it need impractical cooling setups?
Show HN: I built a sonar into my surfboard
I wonder if there is some way you could pull data from the sound of the waves breaking instead of an active ping? That might be the only reasonable way to get accurate readings in that zone.
FWIU, EM backscatter can be used for e.g. gesture recognition, heartbeat detection, and metal detection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter
Entropy of wave noises may or may not be the issue.
Edit: (NASA spinoff) "Radar Device Detects Heartbeats Trapped under Wreckage" https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2018/ps_1.html
> The Edgewood, Maryland-based company is developing a line of such remote sensing devices to aid search and rescue teams, based on advanced radar technologies developed by NASA and refined for this purpose at the Agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
> NASA has long analyzed weak radio signals to identify slight physical movements, such as seismic activity seen from low-Earth orbit or minor alterations in a satellite’s path around another planet that might indicate gravity fluctuations, explains Jim Lux, JPL’s task manager for the FINDER project. However, to pick out such faint patterns in the data, these devices must cancel out huge amounts of noise. “The core technology here is measuring a small signal in the context of another larger signal that’s confusing you,” Lux says.
(FWIW, some branches may have helicopters with infrared that they can cost over for disaster relief.)
Cortical Column Networks
Hey, Cortical Columns!
From "Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214707 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-18218504
What does (parallel) spreading activation have to do with Cortical Column Networks maybe and redundancy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreading_activation
I got the impression that anything transformers could be applied to, that would be an advantage. So now I want everything to use them.
Doesn't sound like these CCNs necessarily reuse a lot of information across object categories.
From https://medium.com/syncedreview/google-replaces-bert-self-at... :
> New research from a Google team proposes replacing the self-attention sublayers with simple linear transformations that “mix” input tokens to significantly speed up the transformer encoder with limited accuracy cost. Even more surprisingly, the team discovers that replacing the self-attention sublayer with a standard, unparameterized Fourier Transform achieves 92 percent of the accuracy of BERT on the GLUE benchmark, with training times that are seven times faster on GPUs and twice as fast on TPUs."
Would Transformers (with self-attention) make what things better? Maybe QFT? There are quantum chemical interactions in the brain. Are they necessary or relevant for what fidelity of emulation of a non-discrete brain?
Startup Ideas
Bring back the dumb terminal. Place mobile phone on a docking pad and see a standard PC OS on the screen - open apps, access files or use a browser. When done just grab the phone and go.
IIUC, in 2021, you can dock a PineTab or a PinePhone with a USB-C PD hub that has HDMI, USB, and Ethernet and use any of a number of Linux Desktop operating systems on a larger screen with full size keyboard and mouse.
The PineTab has a backlit keyboard and IIUC the PinePhone has a keyboard & aux battery case that doesn't yet also include the fingerprint sensor or wireless charging. https://www.pine64.org/blog/
It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated
~ "Imagine that one could give you a copy of all of their knowledge. If you do not choose to apply and learn on your own, you can never."
This is about regimen, this is about stamina, this is about sticktoitiveness; and if you don't want it, you don't need it, you'll never. And I mean never.
The Grit article on Wikipedia mentions persistence and tenacity and stick-to-it-tiveness as roughly synonymous; and that grit may not be that distinct from other Big Five personality traits, but we're not about to listen to that, we're not going with that, because Grit is predictor of success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)
To the original point,
> In psychology, grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's perseverance of effort combined with the passion for a particular long-term goal or end state (a powerful motivation to achieve an objective). This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie on the path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization. Distinct but commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include "perseverance", "hardiness", "resilience", "ambition", "need for achievement" and "conscientiousness". These constructs can be conceptualized as individual differences related to the accomplishment of work rather than talent or ability.
Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
"The parallel he drew was to another friend who’s a Civil Engineer. His friend had to be state certified and build everything to certain codes that stand up to specific stressors and inspections.
I gave him the usual answer about how Software Engineers deal with low stakes and high iterability compared to Civil Engineers, but, honestly, he has a point."
I've argued for awhile now that Software Engineering with a big E should be licensed and regulated the same as any other Engineering discipline. Not all software is low stakes and fast changing. In fact I'd argue the most important software is never that. software for control systems, avionics, cars etc are very high stakes and have no reason to iterate beyond what is needed to interface with changing hardware. I think if software engineers had to be licensed to work on such things then those 737s wouldn't have fallen out of the sky and Tesla wouldn't be allowed to beta test self driving cars on public roads.
To those who ask what do you now call software engineers who don't work on those things, you are programmers. Or if you prefer a less formal term, coders. Engineer is a powerful word and I don't like how the we the IT industry have appropriated it for less critical tasks.
In a way there are standards for software but those standards are not expressed in software terms.
Firstly, most software is harmless. If it goes wrong people may be annoyed, but no one is harmed. But if I write software to control an aircraft, then it would have to abide by aviation standards. If I write financial software then I would have financial regulations to follow. Same for medical devices. So, there are standards for software but they are indirect and expressed in terms of the wider domain in which it runs.
Critical systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_system :
> There are four types of critical systems: safety critical, mission critical, business critical and security critical.
Safety-critical systems > "Software engineering for safety-critical systems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety-critical_system#Softwar... :
> By setting a standard for which a system is required to be developed under, it forces the designers to stick to the requirements. The avionics industry has succeeded in producing standard methods for producing life-critical avionics software. Similar standards exist for industry, in general, (IEC 61508) and automotive (ISO 26262), medical (IEC 62304) and nuclear (IEC 61513) industries specifically. The standard approach is to carefully code, inspect, document, test, verify and analyze the system. Another approach is to certify a production system, a compiler, and then generate the system's code from specifications. Another approach uses formal methods to generate proofs that the code meets requirements.[11] All of these approaches improve the software quality in safety-critical systems by testing or eliminating manual steps in the development process, because people make mistakes, and these mistakes are the most common cause of potential life-threatening errors.
awesome-safety-critical lists very many resources for safety critical systems: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
There are many ['Engineering'] certification programs for software and other STEM fields. One test to qualify applicants does not qualify as a sufficient set of controls for safety critical systems that must be resilient, fault-tolerant, and redundant.
A real Engineer knows that there are insufficient process controls from review of very little documentation; it's just process wisdom from experience. An engineer starts with this premise: "There are insufficient controls to do this safely" because [test scenario parameter set n] would result in the system state - the output of probably actually a complex nonlinear dynamic system - being unacceptable: outside of acceptable parameters for safe operation.
Are there [formal] Engineering methods that should be requisite to "Computer Science" degrees? What about "Applied Secure Coding Practices in [Language]"? Is that sufficient to teach theory and formal methods?
From "How We Proved the Eth2 Deposit Contract Is Free of Runtime Errors" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513922 :
>> From "Discover and Prevent Linux Kernel Zero-Day Exploit Using Formal Verification" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442273 :
>> [Coq, VST, CompCert]
>> Formal methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
>> Formal specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification
>> Implementation of formal specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_engineer...
>> Formal verification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
>> From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :
>>> Which universities teach formal methods?
>>> - q=formal+verification https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+verification
>>> - q=formal+methods https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+methods
>>> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513922
From "Ask HN: Is it worth it to learn C in 2020?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878372 :
> There are a number of coding guidelines e.g. for safety-critical systems where bounded running time and resource consumption are essential. These coding guidelines and standards are basically only available for C, C++, and Ada.
awesome-safety-critical > Software safety standards: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#so...
awesome-safety-critical > Coding Guidelines: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#co...
Major Quantum Computing Strategy Suffers Serious Setbacks
Inevitably, this article (and implications about quantum computing) is going to be vastly misinterpreted due to the title. It would be like saying “Major Shuttle Strategy Suffers Serious Setbacks” but the strategy is using slingshots to get us into orbit, ignoring the work of, say, NASA and SpaceX.
This quantum computing strategy neither was nor is practiced by the vast majority of quantum institutions—commercial or otherwise. It was attempted by a group at Microsoft (and a small collection of other university groups) and was known from the start that it would be a search for essentially fundamentally new observations.
Other quantum computing players, like Rigetti, Google, HRL Laboratories, IBM, Amazon, Honeywell, and others are doing an approach that is nothing like the article, and have demonstrated significant results.
It should really be "A quantum computing strategy suffers..."
Or: "One idea in quantum computing bears no fruit"
"Quantized Majorana conductance not actually observed within indium antimonide nanowires"
"Quantum qubit substrate found to be apparently insufficient" (Given the given methods and probably available resources)
And then - in an attempt to use terminology from Constructor Theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory :
> In constructor theory, a transformation or change is described as a task. A constructor is a physical entity which is able to carry out a given task repeatedly. A task is only possible if a constructor capable of carrying it out exists, otherwise it is impossible. To work with constructor theory everything is expressed in terms of tasks. The properties of information are then expressed as relationships between possible- and impossible tasks. Counterfactuals are thus fundamental statements and the properties of information may be described by physical laws.[4] If a system has a set of attributes, the set of permutations of these attributes is seen as a set of tasks. A computation medium is a system whose attributes permute to always produce a possible task. The set of permutations, and hence of tasks, is a computation set. If it is possible to copy the attributes in the computation set, the computation medium is also an information medium.
> Information, or a given task, does not rely on a specific constructor. Any suitable constructor will serve. This ability of information to be carried on different physical systems or media is described as interoperability, and arises as the principle that the combination of two information media is also an information medium.[4] Media capable of carrying out quantum computations are called superinformation media, and are characterised by specific properties. Broadly, certain copying tasks on their states are impossible tasks. This is claimed to give rise to all the known differences between quantum and classical information.[4]
"Subsequent attempts to reproduce [Quantized Majorana conductance (topological qubits of arranged electrons) within indium antimonide nanowires] eventually as a (quantum) computation medium for the given tasks failed"
"Quantum computation by Majorana zero-mode (MZM) quasiparticles in indium antimonide nanowires not actually apparently possible"
... "But what about in DDR5?" Which leads us to a more generally interesting: "Rowhammer for qubits", which is already an actual Quantum on Silicon (QoS) thing.
Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy may be damaging democracy
First, not having read the article:
#EvidenceBasedPolicy is a worthwhile objective even if only because the alternative is to just blow money without measuring ROI at all [because government expenditures are the actual key to feeding the beast, the economic beast, the...].
What are some examples of policy failures where Systematic review and Meta-analysis could have averted loss, harms, waste, catastrophe, long-term costs? Is that cherry picking? The other times we can just throw a dart and that's better than, ahem, these idiots we afford trying to do science?
Wouldn't it be fair to require that constituent ScholarlyArticles (and other CreativeWorks) be kept on file with e.g. the Library of Congress?
Non-federal governments usually have very similar IT and science policy review needs. Should adapting one system for non-federal governments be more complex than specifying a different String or URL in the token_name field in a transaction?
When experts review ScholarlyArticles on our behalf, they should share their structured and unstructured annotations in such a way that their cryptographically signed reviews - and highlights to identify and extract structured facts like summary statistics like sample size and IRB-reviewed study controls - become part of a team-focused collaborative systematic meta-analysis that is kept on file and regularly reviewed in regards to e.g. retractions, typical cognitive biases, failures in experimental design and implementation, and general insufficiencies that should cause us to re-evaluate our beliefs given all available information which meets our established inclusion criteria.
We have a process for peer review of PDFs - and hopefully datasets with locality for reproducibility and unitarity which purportedly helps us work through something like this sequence:
Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom
We often have gaps in our processes to support such progress in developing wisdom from knowledge that should be predicated upon sound information and data and then experience, bias, creeps in.
Basic principles restricting the powers of the government should prevent the government - us, we - from specifically violating the protected rights of persons; but we have allowed "Science" to cloud our judgement in application of our most basic principles of justice - i.e. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; and Equality and Equitability - and should we chalk the unintended consequences up to ignorance or malice?
More science all around: more Data Literacy - awareness of how many bad statistical claims are made all day around the world everywhere - is good and necessary and essential to Media Literacy, which is how we would be forming our opinions if we didn't have better tools for truth and belief for science.
"What does it mean to know?" etc.
Logic, Inference, Reasoning and Statistics probably predicated upon classical statistical mechanics are supposed to bring us closer to knowing: to bring our beliefs closer to the most widely observed truths.
Which Verifiable Claims do we trust? What studies do we admit into our personal and community meta-analyses according to our shared inclusion criteria?
"Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)" is one standard for meta-analyses, for example. http://www.prisma-statement.org/ . Could the bad guys or the dumb good guys lie with that control in place, too? Can knowing our rights - and upholding oaths to uphold values - protect us from meta-analytical group failure?
Perhaps STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, art, and Medicine/Math) majors and other interested parties can help develop solutions for #EvidenceBasedPolicy?
This one fell flat. Maybe it was the time of day? The question should be asked every year, at least, eh? "Ask HN: Systems for supporting Evidence-Based Policy?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920613
>> What tools and services would you recommend for evidence-based policy tasks like meta-analysis, solution criteria development, and planned evaluations according to the given criteria?
>> Are they open source? Do they work with linked open data?
> I suppose I should clarify that citizens, consumers, voters, and journalists are not acceptable answers
"#LinkedMetaAnalyses", "#StructuredPremises"; Ctrl-F "linkedmeta", "linkedrep", "#LinkedResearch": https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/
Alright, my fair biases disclosed, on to the reading the actual article: /1
Response to 'Call for Review: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0'
Better imho to ask: what user problem is DID solving?
Because: if it's truly decentralized then there's no need to publish it. But publication is a core aspect of DID. That it must be published is a jedi mind trick that allows in "on a blockchain". Now we see the real problem being solved (not a user problem): need something published on a blockchain.
The user problem- for those who see it that way- is that right now, digital stuff related to a person, is tied up primarily with the person's email address, or in some cases with the person's phone number.
(For the purposes of this discussion, call the email address or phone number an "identifier".)
Why is this a problem? Two reasons:
1. People don't "control" those identifiers
Many email addresses used in this context are controlled by employers, and the person's right to use them ends when they leave employment. Or they are controlled through expensive commercial arrangement between the person and the platform, and the person may lose access if they are no longer able to afford the platform. Or, they are free, offered by large data harvesting/advertising platforms, who mine data stored on the platform, and as below, linked to those identifiers from other platforms, to create advertising and propaganda targeting profiles.
2. Those identifiers are used by others to contact the person, and are therefore long-lived, which means they are also a vehicle for correlating an individual's activity across internet platforms who are necessarily presented with those identifiers by the person when they engage with the platform.
DIDs are an attempt to have identifiers that are controlled by people that:
* are inexpensive
* can be short-lived and "rotated"
* can be specific to the relationship between a person and a particular platform
* can support more tailored association of personal data to identifier
* can better support the person's management and correlation of their platform relationships, while minimizing if desired that the correlation of identifiers back to a person by the platforms themselves
* and support other use cases
But the key issue is that right now it is hard to impossible for a normal person to engage with a small or large platform that does not involve a widely used identifier.
[EDIT: whether normal users consider this to be a problem is an open question, and as is whether they would if a solution existed to the problem...]
Somebody introduces a new technology to address these concerns every couple years and it doesn't go anywhere. These aren't actually problems to a lot of users. That's the real problem that needs to be solved - awareness. And that's a lot harder than taking the identity solutions we came up with in the Identity 2.0 days and adding a blockchain.
> Somebody introduces a new technology to address these concerns every couple years and it doesn't go anywhere. These aren't actually problems to a lot of users.
"Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers" https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/
> 2. Use Cases: Online shopper, Vehicle assemblies, Confidential Customer Engagement, Accessing Master Data of Entities, Transferable Skills Credentials, Cross-platform User-driven Sharing, Pseudonymous Work, Pseudonymity within a supply chain, Digital Permanent Resident Card, Importing retro toys, Public authority identity credentials (eIDAS), Correlation-controlled Services
And then, IIUC W3C Verifiable Credentials / ld-proofs can be signed with W3C DID keys - that can also be generated or registered centrally, like hosted wallets or custody services. There are many Use Cases for Verifiable Credentials: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-use-cases/ :
> 3. User Needs: Education, Retail, Finance, Healthcare, Professional Credentials, Legal Identity, Devices
> 4. User Tasks: Issue Claim, Assert Claim, Verify Claim, Store / Move Claim, Retrieve Claim, Revoke Claim
> 5. Focal Use Cases: Citizenship by Parentage, Expert Dive Instructor, International Travel with Minor and Upgrade
> 6. User Sequences: How a Verifiable Credential Might Be Created, How a Verifiable Credential Might Be Used
IIRC DHS funded some of the W3C DID and Verified Credentials specification efforts. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26758099
There's probably already a good way to bridge between sub-SKU GS1 schema.org/identifier on barcodes and QR codes and with DIDs. For GS1, you must register a ~namespace prefix and then you can use the rest of the available address space within the barcode or QR code IIUC.
DIDs can replace ORCIDs - which you can also just generate a new one of - for academics seeking to group their ScholarlyArticles by a better identifier than a transient university email address.
The new UUID formats may or may not be optionally useful in conjunction with W3C DID, VC, and Verifiable News, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088213
When would a DID be a better choice than a UUID?
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
While obviously Jobs’ claim was false, I will say that Apple is the only company I am aware of that manufacturers power supplies which are reliably completely free of perceptible inductor whine. I have very acute high-frequency hearing and I often have to replace non-Apple USB(-C) switching power supplies with Apple ones so I don’t go crazy from the whining. Teardowns of Apple PSUs typically reveal very favorable electronic and industrial design as well.
It’s extremely frustrating, and I was always surprised when I returned mid-range USB chargers because of whine only to receive a replacement with the same problem and hundreds of reviews that failed to mention it. I’ve never had an issue with Apple chargers, and the extra cost is money we’ll spent.
Buy genuine Apple chargers, if not for you, then for your dog.
What does my engineering manager do all day?
I’ve been in those meetings, we’ve all been with different responsibility levels, we know that people are slacking at least 80% of the time and that most of those meetings could be efficiently replaced by emails.
So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less.
I kind of agree.
In my last role I ended up in a fantastic place where the teams under me could operate fairly autonomously and were happy. My only recurring meetings were:
- 1-1s fortnightly and only with senior members
- My 1-1 with my boss, again fortnightly
- Senior leadership team, once a week
I kept 1-1s to 30mins unless someone had an important issue, in which case I was completely flexible.
Most of my time went on planning/strategy, customer research, and acting as an ad-hoc coach for the teams beneath me.
The key things I found were:
- many meetings can be replaced by an update email
- decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings
- you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly
I realise none of this is groundbreaking. But it seems quite rare, and also hard to achieve in practice.
> - many meetings can be replaced by an update email
Highlights from the feed(s); GitLab has the better activity view IMHO but I haven't tried the new GitHub Issues beta yet.
3 questions from 5 minute Stand-Up Meetings (because everyone's actually standing there trying to leave) for Digital Stand Up Meetings: Since, Before, Obstacles:
## 2021-09-28
### @teammembername
#### Since
#### Before
#### Obstacles
You can do cool video backgrounds for any video conferencing app with pipewire.
You can ask team members to prep a .txt with their 3 questions and drop it in the chat such that the team can reply to individual #fragments of your brief status report / continued employment justification argument
> - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings
SO, ah, asynchronous communication doesn't require transcripting for the "Leader Assistant" that does the Mando quarterly minutes from the team chat logs, at least
6 Patterns of Collaboration: GRCOEB: Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus [Six Patterns]; voting on specific Issues, and ideally Chat - [x] lineitems, and https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting with emoji reactions
[Six Patterns]: http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-pat... , Text Templates, Collaboration Checklist: Weighted Criteria, Ranked-choice Voting.
Docs and posts with URLs and in-text pull-quotes do better than another list of citations at the end.
> - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly
Metrics: OKRs, KPIs, #GlobalGoals Goals Targets and Indicators
Tools / Methods; Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom:
- Issues: Title, - [ ] Description, Labels, Assignee, - [ ] Comments, Emoji Reactions;
- Pull Requests, - [ ] [Optional] [Formal] Reviews, Labels & "Codelabels", label:SkipPreflight, CI Build Logs, and Signed Deployed Documented Applications; code talks, the tests win again, docs sell
- Find and Choose - with Consensus - a sufficiently mature Component that already testably does: unified Email notifications (with inbound replies,) and notifications on each and every Chat API and the web standard thing finally, thanks: W3C Web Notifications.
- Contribute Tests for [open source] Components.
- [ ] Create a workflow document with URLs and Text Templates
- [ ] Create a daily running document with my 3 questions and headings and indented markdown checkbox lists; possibly also with todotxt/todo.txt / TaskWarrior & BugWarrior -style lineitem markup.
What does an engineering manager do all day?
A polite answer would be, continuously reevaluate the tests of the product and probably also the business model if anyone knew what they were up to in there
Using two keyboards at once for pain relief
> I tried a few of those Kinesis split keyboards. Too squishy for me. Not far enough apart. The CherryMX Kinesis split keyboard was is too clickey for calls and screenshares. Muscle memory made it difficult to switch.
This is a really cool hack, and I’m happy that the author found a solution for their pain that works for them, but this bit confused me.
Kinesis are keyboards with separated key clusters, but not split keyboards. When one says split keyboard I think they are normally talking about things like the Ergodox EZ/Moonlander which have two physically separate bodies, one for each hand. There are many different models of these with various shapes and sizes, and you can separate them as much as you like. The normal advice is to set them up around shoulder width apart so you aren’t rounding your back to bring your arms together.
Most of these kinds of keyboards also support whatever key switches you prefer, and there are plenty of options that are sufficiently quiet for zoom (pretty much anything linear should do the trick)
I have been using a Moonlander for a couple of years now, and an EZ before that. They are expensive at around $400 but I don’t think I can ever go back. Most of these split keyboards also run QMK so you can setup binds, layers, and generally configure them however you like.
It took me years to find a split, ergo-style keyboard with mechanical keys, but I finally did. The freestyles have them, but I don't like the super flat layout.
I am loving the split, angled setup with my preferred Cherry MX Blues.
The MS Natural split keyboards are easy to find but aren't satisfyingly clicky mechanical keys just like olden times.
How long do these last?
Edit: "Ergonomic keyboard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergonomic_keyboard > #Split_keyboard:
> Split keyboards group keys into two or more sections. Ergonomic split keyboards can be fixed, where you cannot change the positions of the sections, or adjustable. Split keyboards typically change the angle of each section, and the distance between them. On an adjustable split keyboard, this can be tailored exactly to the user. People with a broad chest will benefit from an adjustable split keyboard's ability to customize the distance between the two halves of the board. This ensures the elbows are not too close together when typing. [2]
Waydroid – Run Android containers on Ubuntu
Doubts:
- Is it better/faster/more compatible than anbox?
- Runs on ARM?
- Does it allows me to watch DRM streaming services on my linux box?
- Can I install google play on it?
Waydroid has Android use your actual Linux kernel, so on an x86-64 host you’ll run x86-64 Android, and on an ARM host, ARM Android. This means that there will be some apps that won’t run on your Intel/AMD computer. I have no idea at all how common it is for Android apps to be tied to ARM, but I imagine that ARM64 will have helped with architecture-neutrality.
> This means that there will be some apps that won’t run on your Intel/AMD computer.
Should be able to still run them if you use binfmt_misc. Of course it will be slower but it's possible.
> binfmt_misc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc
> binfmt_misc can also be combined with QEMU to execute programs for other processor architectures as if they were native binaries.[9]
QEMU supported [ARM guest] machines: https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/ARM#Supported_...
Edit: from "Running and Building ARM Docker Containers on x86" (which also describes how to get CUDA working) https://www.stereolabs.com/docs/docker/building-arm-containe... :
sudo apt-get install qemu binfmt-support qemu-user-static # Install the qemu packages
docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes # Execute the registering scripts
docker run --rm -t arm64v8/ubuntu uname -m # Test the emulation environment
> multiarch/qemu-user-static is to enable an execution of different multi-architecture containers by QEMU [1] and binfmt_misc [2]. Here are examples with Docker [3].
Why the heck isn't there just an official Android container and/or a LineageOS container?
It's not a certified device, so.
There are a number of ways to build "multi-arch docker images" e.g. for both x86 and ARM: OCI, docker build, podman build, buildx, buildah.
Containers are testable.
Here's this re: whether the official OpenWRT container should run /sbin/init in order to run procd, ubusd,: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/7975#...
AFAIU, from a termux issue thread re: repackaging everything individually, latest Android requires binaries to be installed from APKs to get the SELinux context label necessary to run?
Biologists Rethink the Logic Behind Cells’ Molecular Signals
I think (hope) that the deterministic model known as lock and key has been known to be a flawed view for quite some time. Books published in the early 00s (notably "Ni Dieu ni gène", by Kupiec and Sonigo) were already making this point in a popular science format, and explaining that even the concept of cells exchanging signals was flawed.
A cell has no evolutionary reason to transmit signals. It will however eat molecules it can use, and excrete molecules that are no longer needed, because this allows the cell to survive and reproduce. A white blood cell eating a bacteria doesn't do so with an intention to protect some organ somewhere in the body, it does so like predator eats prey. Leukocytes who eat well, ie face a bacteria they can eat, then multiply, and end up eating all the bacteria, before dying off when there's nothing more to eat. So they protect the body and then remove themselves, not because they have the intention to do it for the greater good, or because they received a signal, but because they have evolved to prey on bacteria within the ecosystem of the body.
Thinking of the body as a well ordered mechanism is a flawed view, there are no locks and keys, and most likely very few signals if any. Thinking of the body as a dynamically balanced ecosystem seems much closer to how cells behave and to the fantastically complex feedback systems that have evolved over eons and are now balancing the populations of cells in our bodies.
We may be ecosystems of individually oblivious and dumb little cells, but isn't it wondrous that from this emerges a complexity that can say "I" and has consciousness of self?
But reproduction is a fundamental aspect of evolution, and (most?) cells in the body don't reproduce on their own, but rather they are manufactured. T cells for example are manufactured by bone marrow and the thymus multiplies them if I'm understanding correctly. So I'm not sure how that fits in with the view you explained in your post.
In other words the T cell doesn't get feedback on its own fitness. The fitness feedback is at the level of the reproductive success of a human being (healthy humans can have more kids than sick ones), not the reproductive success of a T cell (because it has no reproductive capabilities and therefore cannot be subject to selection pressures). Correct me if I'm wrong.
Most cells or matter in the body?
From https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19136 :
> A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, […] Those numbers are approximate — another person might have half as many or twice as many bacteria, for example — but far from the 10:1 ratio commonly assumed.
Symbiosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis :
> Symbiosis […] is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two different biological organisms, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasitic. […]
> Symbiosis can be obligatory, which means that one or more of the symbionts depend on each other for survival, or facultative (optional), when they can generally live independently. […]
> Symbiosis is also classified by physical attachment. When symbionts form a single body it is called conjunctive symbiosis, while all other arrangements are called disjunctive symbiosis.[3] When one organism lives on the surface of another, such as head lice on humans, it is called ectosymbiosis; when one partner lives inside the tissues of another, such as Symbiodinium within coral, it is termed endosymbiosis.
Endosymbiont: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiont :
> Two major types of organelle in eukaryotic cells, mitochondria and plastids such as chloroplasts, are considered to be bacterial endosymbionts.[6] This process is commonly referred to as symbiogenesis.
Symbiogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis #Secondary_endosymbiosis ... Viral eukaryogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_eukaryogenesis :
> A number of precepts in the theory are possible. For instance, a helical virus with a bilipid envelope bears a distinct resemblance to a highly simplified cellular nucleus (i.e., a DNA chromosome encapsulated within a lipid membrane). In theory, a large DNA virus could take control of a bacterial or archaeal cell. Instead of replicating and destroying the host cell, it would remain within the cell, thus overcoming the tradeoff dilemma typically faced by viruses. With the virus in control of the host cell's molecular machinery, it would effectively become a functional nucleus. Through the processes of mitosis and cytokinesis, the virus would thus recruit the entire cell as a symbiont—a new way to survive and proliferate.
T-Cell # Activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell#Activation
> Both are required for production of an effective immune response; in the absence of co-stimulation, T cell receptor signalling alone results in anergy. […]
> Once a T cell has been appropriately activated (i.e. has received signal one and signal two) it alters its cell surface expression of a variety of proteins.
T-cell receptor § Signaling pathway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-cell_receptor#Signaling_path...
Co-stimulation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-stimulation :
> Co-stimulation is a secondary signal which immune cells rely on to activate an immune response in the presence of an antigen-presenting cell.[1] In the case of T cells, two stimuli are required to fully activate their immune response. During the activation of lymphocytes, co-stimulation is often crucial to the development of an effective immune response. Co-stimulation is required in addition to the antigen-specific signal from their antigen receptors.
Anergy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_anergy :
> [Clonal] Anergy is a term in immunobiology that describes a lack of reaction by the body's defense mechanisms to foreign substances, and consists of a direct induction of peripheral lymphocyte tolerance. An individual in a state of anergy often indicates that the immune system is unable to mount a normal immune response against a specific antigen, usually a self-antigen. Lymphocytes are said to be anergic when they fail to respond to their specific antigen. Anergy is one of three processes that induce tolerance, modifying the immune system to prevent self-destruction (the others being clonal deletion and immunoregulation ).[1]
Clonal deletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_deletion :
> There are millions of B and T cells inside the body, both created within the bone marrow and the latter matures in the thymus, hence the T. Each of these lymphocytes express specificity to a particular epitope, or the part of an antigen to which B cell and T cell receptors recognize and bind. There is a large diversity of epitopes recognized and, as a result, it is possible for some B and T lymphocytes to develop with the ability to recognize self.[4] B and T cells are presented with self antigen after developing receptors while they are still in the primary lymphoid organs.[3][4] Those cells that demonstrate a high affinity for this self antigen are often subsequently deleted so they cannot create progeny, which helps protect the host against autoimmunity.[2][3] Thus, the host develops a tolerance for this antigen, or a self tolerance.[3]
"DNA threads released by activated CD4+ T lymphocytes provide autocrine costimulation" (2019) https://www.pnas.org/content/116/18/8985
> A growing body of literature has shown that, aside from carrying genetic information, both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA can be released by innate immune cells and promote inflammatory responses. Here we show that when CD4+ T lymphocytes, key orchestrators of adaptive immunity, are activated, they form a complex extracellular architecture composed of oxidized threads of DNA that provide autocrine costimulatory signals to T cells. We named these DNA extrusions “T helper-released extracellular DNA” (THREDs).
FWIU, there's also a gut-brain pathway? Or is that also this "signaling method" for feedback in symbiotic complex dynamic systems?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system :
> Complex systems are systems whose behavior is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, competitions, relationships, or other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment. Systems that are "complex" have distinct properties that arise from these relationships, such as nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation, and feedback loops, among others. Because such systems appear in a wide variety of fields, the commonalities among them have become the topic of their independent area of research. In many cases, it is useful to represent such a system as a network where the nodes represent the components and links to their interactions.
Graph, Hypergraph, Property graph, Linked Data, AtomSpace, RDF* + SPARQL*, ONNX, {...}
> The term complex systems often refers to the study of complex systems, which is an approach to science that investigates how relationships between a system's parts give rise to its collective behaviors and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment.[1] The study of complex systems regards collective, or system-wide, behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them.
A multi-digraph of probably nonlinear relations may not be the best way to describe the fields of even just a few electroweak magnets?
> As an interdisciplinary domain, complex systems draws contributions from many different fields, such as the study of self-organization and critical phenomena from physics, that of spontaneous order from the social sciences, chaos from mathematics, adaptation from biology, and many others. Complex systems is therefore often used as a broad term encompassing a research approach to problems in many diverse disciplines, including statistical physics, information theory, nonlinear dynamics, anthropology, computer science, meteorology, sociology, economics, psychology, and biology.
... Glossary of Systems Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory
The Shunting-yard algorithm converts infix notation to RPN
RosettaCode has examples of the Shunting-Yard algorithm for parsing infix notation ((1+2)*3)^4 to an AST or just a stack of data and operators such as RPN: [ ]
Parsing/Shunting-yard algorithm: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Parsing/Shunting-yard_algorithm
Parsing/RPN to infix conversion: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Parsing/RPN_to_infix_conversion...
Applications: testing all combinations of operators with and without term grouping; parentheses; such as evolutionary algorithms or universal function approximaters that explore the space.
For example: https://github.com/westurner/notebooks/blob/gh-pages/maths/b... :
> This still isn't the complete set of possible solutions
[deleted]
How should logarithms be taught?
As one shape of a curve; in a notebook that demonstrates multiple methods of curve fitting with and without a logarithmic transform.
Logarithm: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithm ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithm :
> In mathematics, the logarithm is the inverse function to exponentiation. That means the logarithm of a given number x is the exponent to which another fixed number, the base b, must be raised, to produce that number x.
List of logarithmic identities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logarithmic_identities
List of integrals of logarithmic functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_integrals_of_logarithm...
As functions in a math library or a CAS that should implement the correct axioms correctly:
Sympy Docs > Functions > Contents: https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/functions/index.html#c...
sympy.functions.elementary.exponential. log(x, base=e) == log(x)/log(e), exp(), LambertW(), exp_polar() https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/functions/elementary.h...
"Exponential, Logarithmic and Trigonometric Integrals" sympy.functions.special.error_functions. Ei: exponential integral, li: logarithmic integral, Li: offset logarithmic integral https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/functions/special.html...
numpy.log. log() base e, log2(), log10(), log1p(x) == log(1 + x) https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.log.h...
numpy.exp. exp(), expm1(x) == exp(x) - 1, exp2(x) == 2*x https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.exp.h...
Khan Academy > Algebra 2 > Unit: Logarithms: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra2/x2ec2f6f830c9fb89:...
Khan Academy > Algebra (all content) > Unit: Exponential & logarithmic functions https://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra-home/alg-exp-and-lo...
3blue1brown: "Logarithm Fundamentals | Lockdown math ep. 6", "What makes the natural log "natural"? | Lockdown math ep. 7" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDP5CVelJJ1b...
Feynmann Lectures 22-6: Algebra > Imaginary Exponents: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_22.html#Ch22-S6
Power law functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Power-law_functions
In a two-body problem, of the 4-5 fundamental interactions: Gravity, Electroweak interaction, Strong interaction, Higgs interaction, a fifth force; which have constant exponential terms in their symbolic field descriptions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction#The_in...
Natural logs in natural systems:
Growth curve (biology) > Exponential growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_curve_(biology)#Exponen...
Basic reproduction number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
(... Growth hacking; awesome-grwoth-hacking: https://github.com/bekatom/awesome-growth-hacking )
Metcalf's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
Moore's law; doubling time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
A block reward halving is a doubling of difficulty. What block reward difficulty schedule would be a sufficient inverse of Moore's law?
A few queries:
logarithm cheatsheet https://www.google.com/search?q=logarithm+cheatsheet
logarithm on pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=logarithm
logarithm common core worksheet https://www.google.com/search?q=logarithm+common+core+worksh...
logarithm common core autograded exercise (... Khan Academy randomizes from a parametrized (?) test bank for unlimited retakes for Mastery Learning) https://www.google.com/search?q=logarithm+common+core+autogr...
If only I had started my math career with a binder of notebooks or at least 3-hole-punched notes.
- [ ] Create a git repo with an environment.yml that contains e.g. `mamba install -y jupyter-book jupytext jupyter_contrib_extensions jupyterlab-git nbdime jupyter_console pandas matplotlib sympy altair requests-html`, build a container from said repo with repo2docker, and git commit and push changes made from within the JupyterLab instance that repo2docker layers on top of your reproducible software dependency requirement specification ("REES"). {bash/zsh, git, docker, repo2docker, jupyter, [MyST] markdown and $$ mathTeX $$; Google Colab, Kaggle Kernels, ml-workspace, JupyterLite}
"How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448678
Here's something like MyST Markdown or Rmarkdown for Jupyter-Book and/or jupytext:
## Log functions
Log functions in the {PyData} community
### LaTeX
#### sympy2latex
What e.g. sympy2latex parses that LaTeX into, in terms of symbolic objects in an expression tree:
### numpy
see above
### scipy
### sympy
see above
### sagemath
### statsmodels
### TensorFlow
### PyTorch
## Logarithmic and exponential computational complexity
- Docs: https://www.bigocheatsheet.com/
- [ ] DOC: Rank these with O(1) first: O(n log n), O(log n), O(1), O(n), O(n*2) +growthcurve +exponential
## Combinatorics, log, exp, and Shannon classical entropy and classical Boolean bits
https://www.google.com/search?q=formula+for+entropy :
S=k_{b}\ln\Omega
SI unit for [ ] entropy: joules per kelvin (J*K*-1)
*****
In terms of specifying tasks for myself in order to learn {Logarithms,} I could use e.g. todo.txt markup to specify tasks with [project and concept] labels and contexts; but todo.txt doesn't support nested lists like markdown checkboxes with todo.txt markup and/or codelabels (if it's software math)
- [ ] Read the Logarithms wikipedia page <url> and take +notes +math +logarithms @workstation
- [o] Read
- [x] BLD: mathrepo: generate from cookiecutter or nbdev
- [ ] DOC: mathrepo: logarithm notes
- [ ] DOC,ART: mathrepo: create exponential and logarithmic charts +logarithms @workstation
- [ ] ENH,TST,DOC: mathrepo: logarithms with stdlib math, numpy, sympy (and *pytest* or at least `assert` assertion expressions)
- [ ] ENH,TST,DOC: mathrepo: logarithms and exponents with NN libraries (and *pytest*)
### LaTeX
$$ \log_{b} x = (b^? = x) $$
$$ 2^3 = 8 $$
$$ \log_{2} 8 = 3 $$
$$ \ln e = 1 $$
$$ \log_b(xy)=\log_b(x)+\log_b(y) $$
$ \begin{align}
\textit{(1) } \log_b(xy) & = \log_b(x)+\log_b(y)
\end{align} $
#### sympy2latex
What e.g. sympy2latex parses that LaTeX into, in terms of symbolic objects in an expression tree:
# install
#!python -m pip install antlr4-python3-runtime sympy
#!mamba install -y -q antlr-python-runtime sympy
import sympy
from sympy.parsing.latex import parse_latex
def displaylatexexpr(latex):
expr = parse_latex(latex)
display(str(expr))
display(expr)
return expr
displaylatexexpr('\log_{2} 8'))
# 'log(8, 2)'
displaylatexexpr('\log_{2} 8 = 3'))
# 'Eq(log(8, 2), 3)'
displaylatexexpr('\log_b(xy) = \log_b(x)+\log_b(y)'))
# 'Eq(log(x*y, b), log(x, b) + log(y, b))'
displaylatexexpr('\log_{b} (xy) = \log_{b}(x)+\log_{b}(y)')
# 'Eq(log(x*y, b), log(x, b) + log(y, b))'
displaylatexexpr('\log_{2} (xy) = \log_{2}(x)+\log_{2}(y)')
# 'Eq(log(x*y, 2), log(x, 2) + log(y, 2))'
https://docs.python.org/3/library/operator.html#operator.pow
https://docs.python.org/3/library/math.html#power-and-logari...
math. exp(x), expm1(), log(x, base=e), log1p(x), log2(x), log10(x), pow(x, y) : float, assert sqrt() == pow(x, 1/2)
## scipy
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.s... scipy.special. xlog1py()
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.s...
### sagemath
https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/functions/sage/fu...
### statsmodels
### TensorFlow https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/math tf.math. log(), log1P(), log_sigmoid(), exp(), expm1()
https://keras.io/api/layers/activations/
SmoothReLU ("softplus") adds ln to the ReLU activation function, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier_(neural_networks)#So...
E.g. Softmax & LogSumExp also include natural logarithms in their definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function
### PyTorch
https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.log.html torch. log(), log10(), log1p(), log2(), exp(), exp2(), expm1(); logaddexp() , logaddexp2(), logsumexp(), torch.special.xlog1py()
***
Regarding this learning process and these tools, Now I have a few replies to myself (!) in not-quite-markdown and with various headings: I should consolidate this information into a [MyST] markdown Jupyter Notebook and re-lead the whole thing. If this was decent markdown from the start, I'd have less markup work to do to create a ScholarlyArticle / Notebook.
Automatic cipher suite ordering in Go’s crypto/tls
Summary: The Golang team is deciding what ranked order TLS cipher suites should be used in. You are not able to decide what cipher suites to use, the Golang team sets that in the code and will update it as they see fit.
My take on this is that Filippo is taking a heavy handed approach here. This works for the majority of "dev write code fast ship it over the wall" scenarios. But it also falls apart in a couple scenarios:
* Companies/govt agencies which mandate the use of certain algorithms, such as RSA, and both sides of the connection are running Golang code. Now you need to vendor the TLS library to allow for what the company wants.
* If an issue is discovered with an algorithm it would be really nice to be able to turn off the algorithm in production until the issue can be patched. I'm not sure if this is possible with the current set of changes.
Any government agency that mandates use of specific TLS algorithms (like whitelist) almost certainly requires FIPS cryptography (or classified cryptography), so you won’t be using crypto/TLS anyway.
As a security/cryptography engineer, I love this change: for cryptography, it’s clear that more knobs == more problems.
As a developer, however, I dislike it: more knobs it’s easier to get the code to do what I need it to do.
Personally, I think it’s a good choice by Filippo.
From "Go Crypto and Kubernetes — FIPS 140–2 and FedRAMP Compliance" (2021) https://gokulchandrapr.medium.com/go-crypto-and-kubernetes-f... :
> If a vendor wants to supply cloud-based services to the US Federal Government, then they have to get FedRAMP approval. This certification process covers a whole host of security issues, but is very specific about its requirements on cryptography: usage of FIPS 140–2 validated modules wherever cryptography is needed, these encryption standards protect the cryptographic module from being cracked, altered, or otherwise tampered with. FIPS 140–2 validated encryption is a prerequisite for FedRAMP. [...]
> [...] Go Cryptography and Kubernetes — FIPS 140–2 Kubernetes is a Go project, as are most of the Kubernetes subcomponents and ecosystem. Golang has a crypto standard library, Golang Crypto which fulfills almost all the application crypto needs (TLS stack implementation for HTTPS servers and clients all the way to HMAC or any other primitive that are needed to make signatures to verify hashes, encrypt messages.). Go has made a different choice compared to most languages, which usually come with links or wrappers for OpenSSL or simply don’t provide any cryptography in the standard library (Rust doesn’t have standard library cryptography, JavaScript only has web crypto, Python doesn’t come with a crypto standard library). [...]
> The native go crypto is not FIPS compliant and there are few open proposals to facilitate Go code to meet FIPS requirements. Users can use prominent go compilers/toolsets backed by FIPS validated SSL libraries provided by Google or Redhat which enables Go to bypass the standard library cryptographic routines and instead call into a FIPS 140–2 validated cryptographic library. These toolsets are available as container images, where users can use the same to compile any Go based applications. [...]
> When a RHEL system is booted in FIPS mode, Go will instead call into OpenSSL via a new package that bridges between Go and OpenSSL. This also can be manually enabled by setting `GOLANG_FIPS=1`. The Go Toolset is available as a container image that can be downloaded from Red Hat Container Registry. Red Hat mentions that this as a new feature built on top of existing upstream work (BoringSSL). [...]
> To be FIPS 140–2 compliant, the module must use FIPS 140–2 complaint algorithms, ciphers, key establishment methods, and other protection profiles.
> FIPS-approved algorithms do change at times; not extremely frequently, but more often than they come out with a new version of FIPS 140. [...]
> Some of the fundamental requirements (not limited to) are as follows:
> [...] Support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 is now deprecated (only allowed in certain cases). TLS 1.3 is the preferred option, while TLS 1.2 is only tolerated.
> [...] DSA/RSA/ECDSA are only approved for key generation/signature.
> [...] The 0-RTT option in TLS 1.3 should be avoided.
Was there lag between the release of TLS 1.3 and an updated release of FIPS 140? @18f @DefenseDigital Can those systems be upgraded as easily?
NIST just moves slowly is all.
Common Criteria (NIAP) still only allows TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.1.
Scikit-Learn Version 1.0
There are scikit-learn (sklearn) API-compatible wrappers for e.g. PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Skorch: https://github.com/skorch-dev/skorch
tf.keras.wrappers.scikit_learn: https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/wrappers...
AFAIU, there are not Yellowbrick visualizers for PyTorch or TensorFlow; though PyTorch abd TensorFlow work with TensorBoard for visualizing CFG execution.
> Many machine learning libraries implement the scikit-learn `estimator API` to easily integrate alternative optimization or decision methods into a data science workflow. Because of this, it seems like it should be simple to drop in a non-scikit-learn estimator into a Yellowbrick visualizer, and in principle, it is. However, the reality is a bit more complicated.
> Yellowbrick visualizers often utilize more than just the method interface of estimators (e.g. `fit()` and `predict()`), relying on the learned attributes (object properties with a single underscore suffix, e.g. `coef_`). The issue is that when a third-party estimator does not expose these attributes, truly gnarly exceptions and tracebacks occur. Yellowbrick is meant to aid machine learning diagnostics reasoning, therefore instead of just allowing drop-in functionality that may cause confusion, we’ve created a wrapper functionality that is a bit kinder with it’s messaging.
Looks like there are Yellowbrick wrappers for XGBoost, CatBoost, CuML, and Spark MLib; but not for NNs yet. https://www.scikit-yb.org/en/latest/api/contrib/wrapper.html...
From the RAPIDS.ai CuML team: https://docs.rapids.ai/api/cuml/stable/ :
> cuML is a suite of fast, GPU-accelerated machine learning algorithms designed for data science and analytical tasks. Our API mirrors Sklearn’s, and we provide practitioners with the easy fit-predict-transform paradigm without ever having to program on a GPU.
> As data gets larger, algorithms running on a CPU becomes slow and cumbersome. RAPIDS provides users a streamlined approach where data is intially loaded in the GPU, and compute tasks can be performed on it directly.
CuML is not an NN library; but there are likely performance optimizations from CuDF and CuML that would accelerate performance of NNs as well.
Dask ML works with models with sklearn interfaces, XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch, and TensorFlow: https://ml.dask.org/ :
> Scikit-Learn API
> In all cases Dask-ML endeavors to provide a single unified interface around the familiar NumPy, Pandas, and Scikit-Learn APIs. Users familiar with Scikit-Learn should feel at home with Dask-ML.
dask-labextension for JupyterLab helps to visualize Dask ML CFGs which call predictors and classifiers with sklearn interfaces: https://github.com/dask/dask-labextension
well, this is realy the reason i asked my question.
It is a pain to move in and out of scikit and write all these wrappers and converters. I would prefer to do more in one framework.
For example, doing hyperparameter optimization in pytorch using scikit can be a bit painful sometimes
Ctrl-F automl https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/
> /? hierarchical automl "sklearn" site:github.com : https://www.google.com/search?q=hierarchical+automl+%22sklea...
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-18798244
> Dask-ML works with {scikit-learn, xgboost, tensorflow, TPOT,}. ETL is your responsibility. Loading things into parquet format affords a lot of flexibility in terms of (non-SQL) datastores or just efficiently packed files on disk that need to be paged into/over in RAM. (Edit)
scale-scikit-learn https://examples.dask.org/machine-learning/scale-scikit-lear... -> dask.distributed parallel predication: https://examples.dask.org/machine-learning/parallel-predicti...
"Hyperparameter optimization with Dask" https://examples.dask.org/machine-learning/hyperparam-opt.ht...
> Sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline API: {fit(), transform(), predict(), score(),} https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.pi... : ```
decision_function(X) # Apply transforms, and decision_function of the final estimator
fit(X[, y]) # Fit the model
fit_predict(X[, y]) # Applies fit_predict of last step in pipeline after transforms.
fit_transform(X[, y]) # Fit the model and transform with the final estimator
get_params([deep]) # Get parameters for this estimator.
predict(X, *predict_params) # Apply transforms to the data, and predict with the final estimator
predict_log_proba(X) # Apply transforms, and predict_log_proba of the final estimator
predict_proba(X) # Apply transforms, and predict_proba of the final estimator
score(X[, y, sample_weight]) # Apply transforms, and score with the final estimator
score_samples(X) # Apply transforms, and score_samples of the final estimator.
set_params(**kwargs) # Set the parameters of this estimator
```
> https://docs.featuretools.com can also minimize ad-hoc boilerplate ETL / feature engineering :
>> Featuretools is a framework to perform automated feature engineering. It excels at transforming temporal and relational datasets into feature matrices for machine learning
From https://featuretools.alteryx.com/en/stable/guides/using_dask... :
> Creating a feature matrix from a very large dataset can be problematic if the underlying pandas dataframes that make up the entities cannot easily fit in memory. To help get around this issue, Featuretools supports creating Entity and EntitySet objects from Dask dataframes. A Dask EntitySet can then be passed to featuretools.dfs or featuretools.calculate_feature_matrix to create a feature matrix, which will be returned as a Dask dataframe. In addition to working on larger than memory datasets, this approach also allows users to take advantage of the parallel and distributed processing capabilities offered by Dask
Signed Exchanges on Google Search
From https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-signed-exchanges/ :
> The broader implication of SXGs is that they make content portable: content delivered via an SXG can be easily distributed by third parties while maintaining full assurance and attribution of its origin. Historically, the only way for a site to use a third party to distribute its content while maintaining attribution has been for the site to share its SSL certificates with the distributor. This has security drawbacks. Moreover, it is a far stretch from making content truly portable.
> In the long-term, truly portable content can be used to achieve use cases like fully offline experiences. In the immediate term, the primary use case of SXGs is the delivery of faster user experiences by providing content in an easily cacheable format. Specifically, Google Search will cache and sometimes prefetch SXGs. For sites that receive a large portion of their traffic from Google Search, SXGs can be an important tool for delivering faster page loads to users.
> It’s also possible that all sites could eventually support this standard. Every time a site is loaded, all the linked articles could be pre-loaded. Web speeds across the board would be dramatically increased.
"Signed HTTP Exchanges" draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-...
"Bundled HTTP Exchanges" draft-yasskin-wpack-bundled-exchanges https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-wpack-bundle... :
> Web bundles provide a way to bundle up groups of HTTP responses, with the request URLs and content negotiation that produced them, to transmit or store together. They can include multiple top-level resources with one identified as the default by a primaryUrl metadata, provide random access to their component exchanges, and efficiently store 8-bit resources.
From https://web.dev/web-bundles/ :
> Introducing the Web Bundles API. A Web Bundle is a file format for encapsulating one or more HTTP resources in a single file. It can include one or more HTML files, JavaScript files, images, or stylesheets.
> Web Bundles, more formally known as Bundled HTTP Exchanges, are part of the Web Packaging proposal.
> HTTP resources in a Web Bundle are indexed by request URLs, and can optionally come with signatures that vouch for the resources. Signatures allow browsers to understand and verify where each resource came from, and treats each as coming from its true origin. This is similar to how Signed HTTP Exchanges, a feature for signing a single HTTP resource, are handled.
AlphaGo documentary (2020) [video]
I'm curious to ask what's next for this series of AI at Deepmind? Is there other more challenging problems they are tackling at the moment? I read they have already master StarCraft 2 even.
Is it the case that they have stopped this series of AI and going all in on protein folding at the moment?
This blog post mentions testing on Atari and being applied to chemistry and quantum physics
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/muzero-mastering-go-chess-...
AlphaFold 2 solved the CASP protein folding problem that AFAIU e.g. Folding@home et. al have been churning at for awhile FWIU. From November 2020: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold#SARS-CoV-2 :
> AlphaFold has been used to a predict structures of proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19 [...] The team acknowledged that though these protein structures might not be the subject of ongoing therapeutical research efforts, they will add to the community's understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.[74] Specifically, AlphaFold 2's prediction of the structure of the ORF3a protein was very similar to the structure determined by researchers at University of California, Berkeley using cryo-electron microscopy. This specific protein is believed to assist the virus in breaking out of the host cell once it replicates. This protein is also believed to play a role in triggering the inflammatory response to the infection (... Berkeley ALS and SLAC beamlines ... S309 & Sotrovimab: https://scitechdaily.com/inescapable-covid-19-antibody-disco... )
Is there yet an open implementation of AlphaFold 2? edit: https://github.com/search?q=alphafold ... https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold
How do I reframe this problem in terms of fundamental algorithmic complexity classes (and thus the Quantum Algorithm Zoo thing that might optimize the currently fundamentally algorithmically computationally hard part of the hot loop that is the cost driver in this implementation)?
To cite in full from the MuZero blog post from December 2020: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/muzero-mastering-go-chess-... :
> Researchers have tried to tackle this major challenge in AI by using two main approaches: lookahead search or model-based planning.
> Systems that use lookahead search, such as AlphaZero, have achieved remarkable success in classic games such as checkers, chess and poker, but rely on being given knowledge of their environment’s dynamics, such as the rules of the game or an accurate simulator. This makes it difficult to apply them to messy real world problems, which are typically complex and hard to distill into simple rules.
> Model-based systems aim to address this issue by learning an accurate model of an environment’s dynamics, and then using it to plan. However, the complexity of modelling every aspect of an environment has meant these algorithms are unable to compete in visually rich domains, such as Atari. Until now, the best results on Atari are from model-free systems, such as DQN, R2D2 and Agent57. As the name suggests, model-free algorithms do not use a learned model and instead estimate what is the best action to take next.
> MuZero uses a different approach to overcome the limitations of previous approaches. Instead of trying to model the entire environment, MuZero just models aspects that are important to the agent’s decision-making process. After all, knowing an umbrella will keep you dry is more useful to know than modelling the pattern of raindrops in the air.
> Specifically, MuZero models three elements of the environment that are critical to planning:
> * The value: how good is the current position?
> * The policy: which action is the best to take?
> * The reward: how good was the last action?
> These are all learned using a deep neural network and are all that is needed for MuZero to understand what happens when it takes a certain action and to plan accordingly.
> Illustration of how Monte Carlo Tree Search can be used to plan with the MuZero neural networks. Starting at the current position in the game (schematic Go board at the top of the animation), MuZero uses the representation function (h) to map from the observation to an embedding used by the neural network (s0). Using the dynamics function (g) and the prediction function (f), MuZero can then consider possible future sequences of actions (a), and choose the best action.
> MuZero uses the experience it collects when interacting with the environment to train its neural network. This experience includes both observations and rewards from the environment, as well as the results of searches performed when deciding on the best action.
> During training, the model is unrolled alongside the collected experience, at each step predicting the previously saved information: the value function v predicts the sum of observed rewards (u), the policy estimate (p) predicts the previous search outcome (π), the reward estimate r predicts the last observed reward (u). This approach comes with another major benefit: MuZero can repeatedly use its learned model to improve its planning, rather than collecting new data from the environment. For example, in tests on the Atari suite, this variant - known as MuZero Reanalyze - used the learned model 90% of the time to re-plan what should have been done in past episodes.
FWIU, from what's going on over there:
AlphaGo => AlphaGo {Fan, Lee, Master, Zero} => AlphaGoZero => AlphaZero => MuZero
AlphaGo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_Zero
AlphaZero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero
MuZero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero
AlphaFold {1,2}: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold
IIRC, there is not an official implementation of e.g. AlphaZero or MuZero with e.g. openai/gym (and openai/retro) for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms? https://github.com/openai/gym
What are the benchmarks for Applied RL?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28499001 :
> AFAIU, while there are DLTs that cost CPU, RAM, and Data storage between points in spacetime, none yet incentivize energy efficiency by varying costs depending upon whether the instructions execute on a FPGA, ASIC, CPU, GPU, TPU, or QPU? [...]
> To be 200% green - to put a 200% green footer with search-discoverable RDFa on your site - I think you need PPAs and all directly sourced clean energy.
> (Energy efficiency is very relevant to ML/AI/AGI, because while it may be the case that the dumb universal function approximator will eventually find a better solution, "just leave it on all night/month/K12+postdoc" in parallel is a very expensive proposition with no apparent oracle; and then to ethically filter solutions still costs at least one human)
I'm seeing a lot of cool stuff that people start to build on AlphaFold lately:
- ChimeraX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le7NatFo8vI
Libraries.io indexes software dependencies; but no Dependent packages or Dependent repositories are yet listed for the pypi:alphafold package: https://libraries.io/pypi/alphafold
The GitHub network/dependents view currently lists one repo that depends upon deepmind/alphafold: https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold/network/dependents
(Linked citations for science: How to cite a schema:SoftwareApplication in a schema:ScholarlyArticle , How to cite a software dependency in a dependency specification parsed by e.g. Libraries.io and/or GitHub. e.g. FigShare and Zenodo offer DOIs for tags of git repos, that work with BinderHub and repo2docker and hopefully someday repo2jupyterlite. https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24513808 )
/?gscholar alphafold: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=alphafold
On a Google Scholar search result page, you can click "Cited by [ ]" to check which documents contain textual and/or URL citations gscholar has parsed and identified as indicating a relation to a given ScholarlyArticle.
/?sscholar alphafold: https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=alphafold
On a Semantic Scholar search result page, you can click the "“" to check which documents contain textual and/or URL citations Semantic Scholar has parsed and identified as indicating a relation to a given ScholarlyArticle.
/?smeta alphafold: https://www.meta.org/search?q=t---alphafold
On a Meta.org search result page, you can click the article title and scroll down to "Citations" to check which documents contain textual and/or URL citations Meta has parsed and identified as indicating a relation to a given ScholarlyArticle.
Do any of these use structured data like https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle ? (... https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-28495597 )
Interpretable Model-Based Hierarchical RL Using Inductive Logic Programming
I don't work in the field, but I sort of passively follow it.
A year ago I made this comment, in another ML thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315739
"I often wonder about whether neural networks might need to meet at a crossroads with other techniques."
"Inductive Logic/Answer Set Programming or Constraints Programming seems like it could be a good match for this field. Because from my ignorant understanding, you have a more "concrete" representation of a model/problem in the form of symbolic logic or constraints and an entirely abstract "black box" solver with neural networks. I have no real clue, but it seems like they could be synergistic?"
I've been thinking along the same lines, it seems like logic + ML would complement each other well. Acquiring trustworthy labeled data is "THE" problem in ML, and figuring out which predicates to string together is "THE" problem in logic programming, seems like a perfect match.
A logic program can produce a practically infinite number of perfectly consistent test cases for the ML model to learn from, and the ML model can predict which problem should be solved. I'd like to see a conversational interface that combines these two systems, ML generates logic statements and observes the results, repeat. That might help to keep it from going off the rails like a long GPT-3 session tends to do.
AutoML is RL? The entire exercise of publishing and peer review is an exercise in cybernetics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_logic_network :
> The basic goal of PLN is to provide reasonably accurate probabilistic inference in a way that is compatible with both term logic and predicate logic, and scales up to operate in real time on large dynamic knowledge bases.
> The goal underlying the theoretical development of PLN has been the creation of practical software systems carrying out complex, useful inferences based on uncertain knowledge and drawing uncertain conclusions. PLN has been designed to allow basic probabilistic inference to interact with other kinds of inference such as intensional inference, fuzzy inference, and higher-order inference using quantifiers, variables, and combinators, and be a more convenient approach than Bayesian networks (or other conventional approaches) for the purpose of interfacing basic probabilistic inference with these other sorts of inference. In addition, the inference rules are formulated in such a way as to avoid the paradoxes of Dempster–Shafer theory.
Has anybody already taught / reinforced an OpenCog [PLN, MOSES] AtomSpace hypergraph agent to do Linked Data prep and also convex optimization with AutoML and better than grid search so gradients?
Perhaps teaching users to bias analyses with e.g. Yellowbrick and the sklearn APIs would be a good curriculum traversal?
opening/baselines "Logging and vizualizing learning curves and other training metrics" https://github.com/openai/baselines#logging-and-vizualizing-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero
There's probably an awesome-automl by now? Again, the sklearn interfaces.
TIL that SymPy supports NumPy, PyTorch, and TensorFlow [Quantum; TFQ?]; and with a Computer Algebra System something for mutating the AST may not be necessary for symbolic expression trees without human-readable comments or symbol names? Lean mathlib: https://github.com/leanprover-community/mathlib , and then reasoning about concurrent / distributed systems (with side channels in actual physical component space) with e.g. TLA+.
There are new UUID formats that are timestamp-sortable; for when blockchain cryptographic hashes aren't enough entropy. "New UUID Formats – IETF Draft" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088213
... You can host online ML algos through SingularityNet, which also does PayPal now for the RL.
Our visual / auditory biological neural networks do appear to be hierarchical and relatively highly plastic as well.
If you're planning to mutate, crossover, and select expression trees, you'll need a survival function (~cost function) in order to reinforce; RL.
Blockchains cost immutable data storage with data integrity protections by the byte.
Smart contracts cost CPU usage with costed opcodes. eWASM (Ethereum WebAssembly) has costed opcodes for redundantly-executed smart contracts (that execute on n nodes of a shard) https://ewasm.readthedocs.io/en/mkdocs/determining_wasm_gas_...
AFAIU, while there are DLTs that cost CPU, RAM, and Data storage between points in spacetime, none yet incentivize energy efficiency by varying costs depending upon whether the instructions execute on a FPGA, ASIC, CPU, GPU, TPU, or QPU?
To be 200% green - to put a 200% green footer with search-discoverable RDFa on your site - I think you need PPAs and all directly sourced clean energy.
(Energy efficiency is very relevant to ML/AI/AGI, because while it may be the case that the dumb universal function approximator will eventually find a better solution, "just leave it on all night/month/K12+postdoc" in parallel is a very expensive proposition with no apparent oracle; and then to ethically filter solutions still costs at least one human)
> Perhaps teaching users to bias analyses with e.g. Yellowbrick and the sklearn APIs would be a good curriculum traversal?
Yellowbrick > Third Party Estimaters: (yellowbrick.contrib.wrapper: https://www.scikit-yb.org/en/latest/api/contrib/wrapper.html
From https://www.scikit-yb.org/en/latest/quickstart.html#using-ye... :
> The Yellowbrick API is specifically designed to play nicely with scikit-learn. The primary interface is therefore a Visualizer – an object that learns from data to produce a visualization. Visualizers are scikit-learn Estimator objects and have a similar interface along with methods for drawing. In order to use visualizers, you simply use the same workflow as with a scikit-learn model, import the visualizer, instantiate it, call the visualizer’s fit() method, then in order to render the visualization, call the visualizer’s show() method.
> For example, there are several visualizers that act as transformers, used to perform feature analysis prior to fitting a model. The following example visualizes a high-dimensional data set with parallel coordinates:
from yellowbrick.features import ParallelCoordinates
visualizer = ParallelCoordinates()
visualizer.fit_transform(X, y)
visualizer.show()
IIRC, some automl tools - which test various combinations of, stacks of, ensembles of e.g. Estimators - do test hierarchical ensembles? Are those 'piecewise' and ultimately not the unified theory we were looking for here either (but often a good enough, fast enough, sufficient approximate solution with a sufficiently low error term)?
/? hierarchical automl "sklearn" site:github.com : https://www.google.com/search?q=hierarchical+automl+%22sklea...
Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy
> The reason you’re reliant on a lot of “Asking” might be that you have trust issue. “All changes must be approved” or “Every pull request needs 2 reviewers” are common policies, but they show a lack of trust in the development team.
I'm not following. We do reviews because a second pair of eyes can spot things the author missed.
I've been labelled controversial (amongst other things..) in the past for stating this but hey ho, I'll take another leap:
Aside from the "small changes, fast fixes" type of mantra, and "pairing is better than reviewing" that I suspect Martin Fowler is leaning on (and that I both support strongly):
There is a difference between having reviews, and enforcing reviews.
In my multi-decade career I'm yet to have a signle instance of the thought "thank god we prohibit changes that haven't been reviewed by two other people"
But I have lost count the number of times I've had the thought "I need to bypass this policy because shit's on fire and I've got a fix"
Then comes the question of quality of review when they are mandated.
I'll interject with: Code reviews are no inherently bad. Feedback is good. Collaboration is good. There are better methods of providing feedback than code reviews (I strongly object to the post-facto nature of code reviews)
Mandated peer reviews less so. Feedback is hurried, if not entirely absent, as it becomes another task that people _have_ to do. The time spent reviewing is rarely accounted for. There's a lot of knowledge transfer required for any non-trivial review to be effective, further increasing the demand on the participants.
Code reviews are another tool in the box, but they should not be used for every job.
Where I currently work, we have "skip review" and "skip preflight" labels for this. The mergers have the power to merge anything anyway, the labels are only to make it an official request.
> Where I currently work, we have "skip review" and "skip preflight" labels for this. The mergers have the power to merge anything anyway, the labels are only to make it an official request.
From the OP:
> Changes are categorized as either Ship (merge into mainline without review), Show (open a pull request for review, but merge into mainline immediately), or Ask (open a pull request for discussion before merging).
Right, its like saying checklists are a sign of distrust. No, its an acknowledgement that good intentions dont fix human nature. Have an agreed upon process and stick to it.
Checklists are often a good thing; and an opportunity to optimize processes with team feedback!
"Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19684376 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19684376
Show HN: TweeView – A Tree Visualisation of Twitter Conversations
It would be more useful if one could either follow a link to the replies, or read the full tweet text of the corresponding node by clicking on it.
Also the node div should have a background color, for when an image doesn't load.
As an aside, even though @paulgb says he's not bothered with the use of his library that way, it's so similar that I think common OSS etiquette would've been to acknowledge the original project more prominently.
Cheers. It is all open source on https://github.com/edent/TweeView - where I also credit Paul.
The main 2D view is based on his work - but the interactive view (and 3D views) are based on other projects.
Wireless Charging Power Side-Channel Attacks
The severity and number of side-channel attacks is slowly becoming cripplingly ridiculous. At what point do we just give up with side-channel attacks on consumer devices and assume the mentality that all consumer devices connected to the internet should be treated as insecure by default.
> assume the mentality that all consumer devices connected to the internet should be treated as insecure by default.
"Zero trust security model" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_trust_security_model :
> The main concept behind zero trust is that devices should not be trusted by default, even if they are connected to a managed corporate network such as the corporate LAN and even if they were previously verified.
Checked the power draw a couple years ago on reddit's new design, which was a huge increase from the old design. Should have written a paper with lots of clever words in it, could have been my first scientific contribution!
I didn't because this research has been done long ago and with rsa key operations, which are both more severe if you can capture it and much more difficult to measure. That you can see the difference between multi-megabyte JavaScript pages is a given at that point.
From https://planetfriendlyweb.org/mental-model :
> When you think about how a digital product or website creates an environmental impact, you can think of it creating it in three main ways - through the Packets of data it sends to users, the Platform the product runs on, and the Process used to make the product itself.
From https://sustainableux.com/talks/2018/how-to-build-a-planet-f... :
> SustainableUX: design vs. climate change. Online, Worldwide, Free. The online event for UX, front-end, and product people who want to make a positive impact—on climate-change, social equality, and inclusion
How We Proved the Eth2 Deposit Contract Is Free of Runtime Errors
You know, I'm not really into cryptocurrency, but it does seem like it's contributing to a resurgence of interest in formal methods. So - thank you, cryptocurrency community!
From "Discover and Prevent Linux Kernel Zero-Day Exploit Using Formal Verification" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27442273 :
> [Coq, VST, CompCert]
> Formal methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
> Formal specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification
> Implementation of formal specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_engineer...
> Formal verification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
> From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :
>> Which universities teach formal methods?
>> - q=formal+verification https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+verification
>> - q=formal+methods https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+methods
>> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs?
To clarify, they implemented the algorithm in Dafny, and then proved that version correct. They did not verify code that will actually run in production.
From the paper:
> Dafny is a practical option for the verification of mission-critical smart contracts, and a possible avenue for adoption could be to extend the Dafny code generator engine to support Solidity … or to automatically translate Solidity into Dafny. We are currently evaluating these options
https://github.com/dafny-lang/dafny
Dafny Cheat Sheet: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kz5_yqzhrEyXII96eCF1YoHZ...
Looks like there's a Haskell-to-Dafny converter.
Physics-Based Deep Learning Book
"Physics-based" Deep Learning seems like a misnomer. From the abstract "Deep Learning Applications for Physics" sounds more apt. There definitely is value in transferring standard terminology and methods from physics to deep learning. But from the preview it's unclear if that is the focus.
Indeed, “Deep Learning Based Physics” seems a little more correct.
The common terminology is Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs)
"Physics-informed neural networks" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed_neural_networ...
But what about statistical thermodynamics and information theory? What about thin film?
What are some applications for PINNs and for {DL, RL,} in physics?
Ask HN: Books that teach you programming languages via systems projects?
Looking for a book/textbook that teaches you a programming language through systems (or vice versa). For example, a book that teaches modern C++ by showing you how to program a compiler; a book that teaches operating systems and the language of choice in the book is Rust; a book that teaches database internals through Golang; etc. Basically, looking for a fun project-based book that I can walk through and spend my free time working through.
Any recommendations?
From "Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26042447 :
> "Agile Web Development with Rails [6]" (2020) teaches TDD and agile in conjunction with a DRY, CoC, RAD web application framework: https://g.co/kgs/GNqnWV
And:
> "ugit – Learn Git Internals by Building Git in Python" https://www.leshenko.net/p/ugit/
How you can track your personal finances using Python
> We take the output of the previous step, pipe everything over to our .beancount file, and "balance" transactions.
> Recall that the flow of money in double-entry accounting is represented using transactions involving at least two accounts. When you download CSVs from your bank, each line in that CSV represents money that's either incoming or outgoing. That's only one leg of a transaction (credit or debit). It's up to us to provide the other leg.
> This act is called "balancing".
Balance (accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(accounting)
Are unique record IDs necessary for this [financial] application? FWICS, https://plaintextaccounting.org/ just throws away the (probably per-institution) transaction IDs; like a non-reflexive logic that eschews Law of identity? Just grep and wc?
> What does the ledger look like?
> I wrote earlier that one of the main things that Beancount provides is a language specification for defining financial transactions in a plain-text format.
> What does this format look like? Here's a quick example:
option "title" "Alice"
option "operating_currency" "EUR"
; Accounts
2021-01-01 open Assets:MyBank:Checking
2021-01-01 open Expenses:Rent
2021-01-01 * "Landlord" "Thanks for the rent"
Assets:MyBank:Checking -1000.00 EUR
Expenses:Rent 1000.00 EUR
The star is just an 1-digit field for "flag". I don't think there are any defined semantics for the field but by convention 'star' means something 'no special flags on this transaction'.
People use other flags to indicate, for instance, whether a transaction has been reconciled, or cleared their bank, or whatnot.
a REST API such as: https://plaid.com/
Plaid has serious privacy and security concerns, so I would be careful:
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28203393 :
> No, your personal data is not sold or rented or given away or bartered to parties that are not Plaid, your bank, or the connected app. We talk about all of this in our privacy policy, including ways that data could be used — for example, with data processors/service providers (like AWS which hosts our services) for the purposes of running Plaid’s services or for a user’s connected app to provide their services.
>> I saw that. Thank you for your patience and persistence in responding to so many pointed questions.
>> For any interested, here is a link to relevant section of the referenced privacy policy: https://plaid.com/legal/#consumers
>> I am also impressed by the Legal Changelog on the same page that clearly lays out a log of changes made to privacy & other published legal documents.
The comments in those threads were more negative than positive, and the fact that Plaid paid a $58 million settlement for allegedly sharing personal banking data with third parties without consent is telling enough. I am not going to give my banking usernames and passwords to Plaid in plaintext, when their employee is arguing on HN over what the word "sold" means:
Are you making claims without evidence? Settling is not admission of guilt.
Banks should implement read-only OAuth APIs, so that users are not required to store their u/p/sqa answers.
From "Canada calls screen scraping ‘unsecure,’ sets Open Banking target for 2023" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28229957 :
> AFAIU, there are still zero (0) consumer banking APIs with Read-Only e.g. OAuth APIs in the US as well?
Looks like there may be less than 3 so far.
> Banks could save themselves CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and liability by implementing read-only API tokens and methods that need only return JSON - instead of HTML or worse, monthly PDF tables for a fee - possibly similar to the Plaid API: https://plaid.com/docs/api/
> There is competition in consumer/retail banking, but still the only way to do e.g. budget and fraud analysis with third party apps is to give away all authentication factors: u/p/sqa; and TBH that's unacceptable.
> Traditional and distributed ledger service providers might also consider W3C ILP: Interledger Protocol (in starting their move to quantum-resistant ledgers by 2022 in order to have a 5 year refresh cycle before QC is a real risk by 2027, optimistically, for science) when reviewing the entropy of username+password_hash+security_question_answer strings in comparison to the entropy of cryptoasset account public key hash strings: https://interledger.org/developer-tools/get-started/overview...
> Are you making claims without evidence?
No. Plaid did agree to pay the $58 million, and the lawsuit was for alleged data sharing with third parties without user consent. I don't care if they admit guilt or not. They agreed to pay $58 million to end the lawsuit, and that does not engender trust. Shifting the blame to banks doesn't make Plaid any more reputable.
Providing usernames and passwords of sensitive accounts to a third party is a privacy and security risk, and Plaid has not earned enough trust from me to justify the risk I would need to assume to use their services.
How did their policies change before and after said settlement?
From https://my.plaid.com/help/360043065354-does-plaid-have-acces... :
> Does Plaid have access to my credentials?
> The type of connection Plaid has to your financial institution determines whether or not we have access to the login credentials for your financial account: your username and password.
> In many cases, when you link a financial institution to an app via Plaid, you provide your login credentials to us and we securely store them. We use those credentials to access and obtain information from your financial institution in order to provide that information, at your direction, to the apps and services you want to use. For more information on how we use your data, please refer to our End User Privacy Policy.
> In other cases, after you request that we link your financial institution to an app or service you want to use, you will be prompted to provide your login credentials directly to your financial institution––not to Plaid––and, upon successful authentication, your financial institution will then return your data to Plaid. In these cases, Plaid does not access or store your account credentials. Instead, your financial institution provides Plaid with a type of security identifier, which permits Plaid to securely reconnect to your financial institution at regularly scheduled intervals to keep your apps and services up-to-date.
> Regardless of which type of connection is made, we do not share your credentials with the apps or services you’ve linked to your financial institution via Plaid. You can read more about how Plaid handles data here.
What do you think this should say instead?
Do you think they use the same key to securely store all accounts, like ACH? Or no key, like the bank ledger that you're downloading a window of as CSV through hopefully a read-only SQL account, hopefully with data encrypted at rest and in motion.
When you download a CSV or a OFX to a local file, is the data then still encrypted at rest?
Again, US Banks can eliminate the need for {Plaid, Mint, } as the account data access middlemen by providing a read-only OAuth API. Because banks do not have a way to allow users to grant read-only access to their account ledgers, the only solution is to securely store the u/p/sqa. If you write a script to fetch your data and call it from cron, how can you decrypt the account credentials after an unattended reboot? When must a human enter key material to decrypt the stored u/p/sqa?
Here, we realize that banks should really have people that do infosec - that comprehend symmetric and assymetric cryptography - audits to point out these sorts of vulnerabilities and risks. And if they had kept current with the times, we would have a very different banking and finance information system architecture with fewer single points of failure.
I'm not interested in what Plaid puts in a help page, since Plaid's $58 million settlement is for alleged data sharing with third parties without consent, meaning that Plaid is accused of not properly communicating the alleged data sharing to its users or obtaining permission.
And Plaid's terms of service (https://plaid.com/legal/#how-we-use-your-information) contains vague catch-alls such as:
> We share your End User Information for a number of business purposes:
> With our data processors and other service providers, partners, or contractors in connection with the services they perform for us or developers
Sure, it would be great if banks offered different authentication systems, but that has nothing to do with my lack of trust for Plaid. A different authentication system wouldn't eliminate the data sharing concerns I have with Plaid.
CISA Lays Out Security Rules for Zero Trust Clouds
"Cloud Security Technical Reference Architecture (TRA)" (2021) https://cisa.gov/publication/cloud-security-technical-refere...
> The Cloud Security TRA provides agencies with guidance on the shared risk model for cloud service adoption (authored by FedRAMP), how to build a cloud environment (authored by USDS), and how to monitor such an environment through robust cloud security posture management (authored by CISA).
> Public Comment Period - NOW OPEN! CISA is releasing the Cloud Security TRA for public comment to collect critical feedback from agencies, industry, and academia to ensure the guidance fully addresses considerations for secure cloud migration. The public comment period begins Tuesday, September 7, 2021 and concludes on Friday, October 1, 2021. CISA is interested in gathering feedback focused on the following key questions: […]
"Zero Trust Maturity Model" (2021) https://cisa.gov/publication/zero-trust-maturity-model
> CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model is one of many roadmaps for agencies to reference as they transition towards a zero trust architecture. The goal of the maturity model is to assist agencies in the development of their zero trust strategies and implementation plans and present ways in which various CISA services can support zero trust solutions across agencies.
> The maturity model, which include five pillars and three cross-cutting capabilities, is based on the foundations of zero trust. Within each pillar, the maturity model provides agencies with specific examples of a traditional, advanced, and optimal zero trust architecture.
> Public Comment Period – NOW OPEN! CISA drafted the Zero Trust Maturity Model in June to assist agencies in complying with the Executive Order. While the distribution was originally limited to agencies, CISA is excited to release the maturity model for public comment.
> CISA is releasing the Zero Trust Maturity Model for public comment beginning Tuesday, September 7, 2021 and concludes on Friday, October 1, 2021. CISA is interested in gathering feedback focused on the following key questions: […]
"Zero trust security model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_trust_security_model
Show HN: Heroku Alternative for Python/Django apps
I have been following this space alot. Heroku like deployment spaces have exploded recently partly because people miss that experience, partly because buildpack is opensource[1], partly because we have gone through a techshift where it is pretty easy to emulate that. There are two broad categories - 1. Dokku's of the world, one VM (very recently tried adding multi node) and then more recently getporter.dev[2] and okteto[3] of the world that is trying to replicate heroku on kubernetes.
One of things, I noticed is that, It looks really cool at first look but every organisation has their own complexity in deploying stuff. It is an integration hell, you have to provide white glove treatment to all customers and eventually you have a hard time scaling. We tried it too, and what we noticed if you have to go an enterprise and sell, you start doing leaky abstraction. It works really well for early stage startups but once they have the money you prefer something more customizable and robust solution.
This project looks cool. I do not want to discourage anyone but again, it is a red ocean out there.
The problem is the layering of the abstractions. Having PaaS on top of Kubernetes in a way that you move down to a more powerful primitive is going to be the most scalable.
What happened in the public cloud space was a disparate set of services which made the choices really costly. Azure went in heavy on PaaS while AWS was focused on VMs. The easy adoption and migration was on AWS. K8s seems like a reasonable abstraction that reduces the cost of these decisions because people seem to agree that K8s is a reasonable base.
Being able to slide on a compatible PaaS layer shouldn't negate that K8s investment, and make it easier to adopt for some organizations, or parts of those organizations. But, I wouldn't argue that we are the point where that layer is mature.
dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes#function...
> The following functionality has been implemented: Deployment and Service annotations, Domain proxy support via the Nginx Ingress Controller, Environment variables, Letsencrypt SSL Certificate integration via CertManager, Pod Disruption Budgets, Resource limits and reservations (reservations == kubernetes requests), Zero-downtime deploys via Deployment healthchecks, Traffic to non-web containers (via a configurable list)
SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials
From OP:
> Between eighty and ninety percent (80%-90%) of a modern application is assembled from open source software components. An SBOM accounts for the software components contained in an application — open source, proprietary, or third-party — and details their provenance, license, and security attributes. SBOMs are used as a part of a foundational practice to track and trace components across software supply chains. SBOMs also help to proactively identify software issues and risks and establish a starting point for their remediation.
> SPDX results from ten years of collaboration from representatives across industries, including the leading Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors – making it the most robust, mature, and adopted SBOM standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Package_Data_Exchange
Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS
Ah cool… I also took a stab at something similar several years ago: https://github.com/ecausarano/heron
Also at the time I was considering IPFS.
But I guess the real trick is implementing a WOT to implement peer review and filter out the inevitable junk that will be published
"Help compare Comment and Annotation services: moderation, spam, notifications, configurability" executablebooks/meta#102 https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102 :
> jupyter-comment supports a number of commenting services [...]. In helping users decide which commenting and annotation services to include on their pages and commit to maintaining, could we discuss criteria for assessment and current features of services?
> Possible features for comparison:
> * Content author can delete / hide
> * Content author can report / block
> * Comments / annotations are screened by spam-fighting service
> * Content / author can label as e.g. toxic
> * Content author receives notification of new comments
> * Content author can require approval before user-contributed content is publicly-visible
> * Content author may allow comments for a limited amount of time (probably more relevant to BlogPostings)
> * Content author may simultaneously denounce censorship in all it's forms while allowing previously-published works to languish
#ForScience
FWIW, archiving repo2docker-compatible git repos with a DOI attached to a git tag, is possible with JupyterLite:
> JupyterLite is a JupyterLab distribution that runs entirely in the browser built from the ground-up using JupyterLab components and extensions
With JupyterLite, you can build a static archive of a repo2docker-like environment so that the ScholarlyArticle notebook or computer modern latex css, its SoftwareRelease dependencies, and possibly also the Datasets can be run in a browser tab with WASM. HTML + JS + WASM
New Texas Abortion Law Likely to Unleash a Torrent of Lawsuits Against Education
All this talk about Austin becoming the new SV - but then you see regressive laws like this getting pushed through. No thanks.
Migration of people from SV to Austin will change the political landscape and stop stuff like this from being passed.
You don't have to pay prisoners for work in Texas.
Unfortunately, I find it necessary to help elucidate some moral issues that recent legal developments in one state of the Union have brought to light.
Such a God is correctly assessed as hostile to the patrons of Earth.
Such a creation myth involving seven (7) days to create Heaven, Hell Lite, and Hell (Heaven, Earth, and Hell) is what we must interpret.
At issue is whether the singular, supernatural God in Heaven is Benevolent (Good) and Omnipotent (All-knowing). Why would a loving God create Heaven without suffering on the first day, and then create Earth etc. with suffering on the succeeding days? Why not create Heaven for all? Why send infants into a life of suffering on Earth (Hell Lite) when they could be sent directly to Heaven with no suffering?
Ergo, God's plan is to force babies to suffer on Earth for awhile; but if they die sinless, then they go to Heaven where parents aren't needed. Ergo, Heaven is full of parentless dead babies.
You've made asses of yourselfs in trying to manipulate others into your golden candlestick tax districts, where the whole congregation does not have healthcare.
God created a world in need of healthcare, and isn't getting healthcare to it.
Ergo, because God created a world of suffering for us - and babies - god is not Friendly. And if god is not friendly, god is a very poor basis for our morality, and for our legal system.
Case in point: did god ask for Mary's (or even Joseph's) consent?
A benevolent god would design in required consent.
In the Christian bible, furthermore, god tells them to kill even the enemies' women and unborn children. Ergo, god does not value the sanctity of infants' lives over other concerns.
For citations of scripture, see e.g. Freedom from Religion Foundation > What Does the Bible Really Say About Abortion? https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/25602-abortion-rights
A very poor basis for morality and law, indeed.
What is "Original Sin" if not a suggestion that we should choose very wisely?
And when they rolled that [silver] rock from the tomb, behold what did they find? No dead baby; for the dead baby of god was in heaven, gentlemen. Sinless dead babies all go to heaven, gentlemen.
I think we can all agree that preventing unintended pregnancy is a worthwhile objective; though we have very differing views on whether abstinence-based education works. States with higher rates of religiosity (by church attendance) have higher rates of teen pregnancy: there is a somewhat strong positive correlation.
A standing prayer request: Pray that we might get healthcare to our congregation.
IDK, what do we say here? We're going to start needing to be making some changes?
Roman society context on this one:
Vestal virgins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestal_Virgin
Baiae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiae
https://pbsinternational.org/programs/underwater-pompeii/ :
> Baiae: an ancient Roman city lost to the same volcanoes that entombed Pompeii. But unlike Pompeii, Baiae sits under water, in the Bay of Naples. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the city was an escape for Rome’s rich and powerful elite, a place where they were free of the social restrictions of Roman society. But then the city sank into the ocean, to be forgotten in the annals of history. Now, a team of archaeologists is mapping the underwater ruins and piecing together what life was like in this playground for the rich. What made Baiae such a special place? And what happened to it?
Woe! Woe unto the obviously promiscuous.
DARPA grant to work on sensing and stimulating the brain noninvasively [video]
Won't this mean that you cannot think of anything else while operating the equipment?
Do you need to not think of anything else to move your arms?
Ex-BCI research student here.
The nerves that control your arm are wired directly into your central nervous system and can active your muscles in direct response to action potentials fanned out from a single neuron.
These noninvasive technologies pick up aggregate signals from hundreds of thousands of neurons all firing pseudo-randomly, filtered spatially by the dura (thick layer of membrane that protects the brain), skull, flesh, skin and hair.
A more "HN" analogy would be like comparing a directly wired Ethernet connection (nerves connected to the CNS) to a side channel attack on an air-gapped system (noninvasive EEG). While randomly running background processes (normally) won't affect the data transmitted to the network, they will absolutely foil most side channel attacks.
What about with realtime NIRS with an (inverse?) scattering matrix? From https://www.openwater.cc/technology :
> Below are examples of the image quality we have achieved with our breakthrough scanning systems that use just red and near-infrared light and ultrasound pings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy
Another question: is it possible to do ah molecular identification similar to idk quantum crystallography with photons of any wavelength, such as NIRS? Could that count things in samples?
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1239012387367387138 :
> ... quantum crystallography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_crystallography There's probably some limit to infrared crystallography that anyone who knows anything about particles and lattices would know about ?
> What about with realtime NIRS with an (inverse?) scattering matrix?
I've purged a lot of the knowledge from that time from my brain, but from what I recall fNIRS takes a long time (on the order of multiple seconds) to take a single reading.
It also only really shows which regions of the brain are receiving more blood supply. While a huge improvement in spacial precision over EEG, it's still not anywhere near the same level of precision that a directly-wired nerve has.
That doesn't mean it's useless technology, just probably not viable for the low-latency, high-accuracy control you'd want for a military drone.
>Another question: is it possible to do ah molecular identification similar to idk quantum crystallography with photons of any wavelength, such as NIRS? Could that count things in samples?
I have absolutely no idea about molecular identification or quantum crystallography, so probably can't give you a good answer on that one.
The newer systems can sample much faster (10-100 Hz), but they're still limited by the fact that they're measuring a hemodynamic signal that lags behind neural activity.
Which other strong and weak forces could [photonic,] sensors detect?
IIUC, they're shooting for realtime MRI resolution with NIRS; to be used during surgery to assist surgery in realtime.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation#Overview says brainwaves are 1-150 Hz? IIRC compassion is acheivable on a bass guitar.
A couple of studies linked in Wikipedia for this use (one retracted):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4049706/
Retracted: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Table with resolution differences between different techniques:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8116487/table/T...
Most NIRS systems use continuous-wave (CW) systems detecting blood oxygenation/chromophore concentration. I say this because, in the time domain, you're looking at 5-7 seconds to see changes in cerebral oxygenation.
It's also noteworthy that you're dealing with huge amounts of noise, very low resolution, and are limited to the cortical surface. This limits the applications in the BCI-domain.
I'm currently researching the feasability of fast optical imaging. This has to be done in the frequency domain, but may yield temporal resolution in the milliseconds. The downside is finding an incoherent light source that's able to be modulated fast enough to detect the scattering changes.
You mentioned "time-domain", and I recalled "time-polarization".
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1049860034899927040 :
https://web.archive.org/web/20171003175149/https://www.omnis...
"Mind Control and EM Wave Polarization Transductions" (1999)
> To engineer the mind and its operations directly, one must perform electrodynamic engineering in the time * domain, not in the 3-space EM energy density domain.*
Could be something there.
Topological Axion antiferromagnet https://phys.org/news/2021-07-layer-hall-effect-2d-topologic... :
> Researchers believe that when it is fully understood, TAI can be used to make semiconductors with potential applications in electronic devices, Ma said. The highly unusual properties of Axions will support a new electromagnetic response called the topological magneto-electric effect, paving the way for realizing ultra-sensitive, ultrafast, and dissipationless sensors, detectors and memory devices.
Optical topological antennas https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2021/02/light-unbound-... :
> The new work, reported in a paper published Feb. 25 in the journal Nature Physics, throws wide open the amount of information that can be multiplexed, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source. A common example of multiplexing is the transmission of multiple telephone calls over a single wire, but there had been fundamental limits to the number of coherent twisted light waves that could be directly multiplexed.
Rydberg sensor https://phys.org/news/2021-02-quantum-entire-radio-frequency... :
> Army researchers built the quantum sensor, which can sample the radio-frequency spectrum—from zero frequency up to 20 GHz—and detect AM and FM radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other communication signals.
> The Rydberg sensor uses laser beams to create highly-excited Rydberg atoms directly above a microwave circuit, to boost and hone in on the portion of the spectrum being measured. The Rydberg atoms are sensitive to the circuit's voltage, enabling the device to be used as a sensitive probe for the wide range of signals in the RF spectrum.
> "All previous demonstrations of Rydberg atomic sensors have only been able to sense small and specific regions of the RF spectrum, but our sensor now operates continuously over a wide frequency range for the first time,"
Sometimes people make posters or presentations for new tech, in medicine.
The xMed Exponential Medicine conference / program is in November this year: https://twitter.com/ExponentialMed
Space medicine also presents unique constraints that more rigorously select from possible solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_medicine
There is no progress in medicine without volunteers for clinical research trials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research
New Ways to Be Told That Your Python Code Is Bad
> Python programmers in general have an irrational aversion to if-expressions, a.k.a. the “ternary” operator.
Because the Python ternary operator is fucking backwards! Why on earth would you put the condition in the middle!?
x = 4 if condition() else 5
condition() ? 4 : 5
(setq x (if (condition) 4 5))
As I recall, object? and object?? are and work in IPython because the Python mailing list said that the ternary operator was not reserved. (IIRC there was yet no formal grammar or collections.abc or maybe even datetime or json yet at the time).
Ternary expressions on one line require branch coverage to be enabled in your e.g. pytest; otherwise it'll look like the whole line is covered by tests when each branch on said line hasn't actually been tested.
.get() -> Union[None, T]Web-based editor
It looks like this is actually just the editor from Visual Studio Online unless I've missed something.
It's great, but if it were really Visual Studio Code that would be awesome and I'd be pleasantly surprised.
(The difference being that if it's just the editor it misses out on all the compiler/analysis integrations. If Github were providing Linux containers in the cloud for working on projects - essentially the SSH feature from Visual Studio Code - it would be absolutely brilliant.)
I think what you might want is GitHub Codespaces?: https://github.com/features/codespaces. Was on HN recently too.
Hmm. $0.18 per hour for 4GB of RAM is a rather steep. A c6g.large on AWS would run you less than a half of that, for the same number of CPUs and memory. A quarter if you're happy to use spot instances. Might be neat to have an OSS tool that spins up an EC2 (or Azure or GCP) instance running Code-Server[1] (VS Code running natively on the server, but presenting the UI in the browser), with a given git repo and credentials.
Admittedly, the storage costs would be higher.
The ml-workspace docker image includes Git, Jupyter, VS Code, SSH, and "many popular data science libraries & tools" https://github.com/ml-tooling/ml-workspace
docker run -p 8080:8080 -v "${PWD}:/workspace" mltooling/ml-workspace
docker run --name=cocalc -d -v ~/cocalc:/projects -p 443:443 sagemathinc/cocalcGitHub Copilot Generated Insecure Code in 40% of Circumstances During Experiment
For comparison, what percentage of human-generated code is secure?
> For comparison, what percentage of human-generated code is secure?
Yeah how did they measure? Did static and dynamic analysis find design bugs too?
Maybe - as part of a Copilot-assisted DevSecOps workflow involving static and dynamic analysis run by GitHub Actions CI - create Issues with CWE "Common Weakness Enumeration" URLs from e.g. the CWE Top 25 in order to train the team, and Pull Requests to fix each issue?: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/
Which bots send PRs?
AAS Journals Will Switch to Open Access
Publication charges for authors and students will probably rise for a factor of 2 or more... open access journals in technical fields are approaching $500 per page.
This will basically lock out people in the developing world from publishing in these journals.
> JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:
>> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper
> [joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs
^^ from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517711 & this log of my non- markdown non- W3C Web Annotation threaded comments with URIs: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24517711
Does anyone here have thoughts on JOSS? I've reviewed for them once, had the impression the editors take their job seriously, and think I'll review again in the future. The review approach that the journal facilitates has a strong focus on engineering aspects, i.e. it addresses a weakness of other venues, where it often does not matter how messy, unstable, and poorly documented the code is (or even if it compiles). On the other hand, the JOSS reviewers are typically not experts on the problem that the software is solving.
I'm currently reviewing for JOSS, and have done so before. In many ways they're a very strange journal: the paper is nearly an afterthought, and the review is focused on the code. But I like them. As you say, the editors take their role seriously. And it seems to have two valuable contributions.
Firstly, encouraging and structuring code review in academia. My own code is almost entirely solo (and messy), so a venue for structured review and an incentive to robustify public code is good. Secondly, the culture in some disciplines is that code is not citable, only papers - and JOSS is an end-run around this. I hope this second situation is changing, but we're not there yet so JOSS has a valuable role for the moment in simply being a 'journal' assigning DOIs basically for code packages.
[Scholarly] Code review tools; criteria and implementations?
Does JOSS specify e.g. ReviewBoard, GitHub Pull Request reviews, or Gerrit for code reviews?
The reviews for JOSS happen on github[0] but the journal's not prescriptive about how you develop your package as long as the code is public. The criteria for the JOSS review are very clear[1].
I don't want to oversell the depth of the code review possible; not all of the reviewers will be fully expert in whatever tiny cutting-edge area the package is for (making correctness checks difficult beyond the test suite), and most of us are academics-who-code rather than research software engineers. But the fact it's happening at all is a great step forward.
[0]: https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues [1]: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/review_criteria.html
Thanks for the citations. Looks like Wikipedia has "software review" and "software peer review":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_review
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_peer_review
I'd add "Antipatterns" > "Software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_design
and "Code smells" > "Common code smells" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell#Common_code_smells
and "Design smells" for advanced reviewers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_smell
and the CWE "Common Weakness Enumeration" numbers and thus URLs for Issues from the CWE Top 25 and beyond: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/
FWIW, many or most scientists are not even trying to be software engineers: they just write slow code without reusing already-tested components and expect someone else to review Pull Requests after their PDF is considered impactful. They know enough coding to push the bar for their domain a bit higher each time.
Are there points for at least in-writing planing for the complete lifecycle and governance of an ongoing thesis defense of open source software for science; after we publish, what becomes of this code?
From https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs :
> Income: JOSS has an experimental collaboration with AAS publishing where authors submitting to one of the AAS journals can also publish a companion software paper in JOSS, thereby receiving a review of their software. For this service, JOSS receives a small donation from AAS publishing. In 2019, JOSS received $200 as a result of this collaboration.
A low cost of $1/page just shows how much of a scam even prestigious journals have become for all involved parties.
Referees work for free. Submitting authors pay through the nose for presumably typesetting and proofs whose true cost is closer to $1/page rather than hundreds. Editors are overworked.
Sci-Hub was supposed to disrupt that industry, but it seems all it's done is shift burden to authors and created pay-for publishing.
Moderation costs money, too.
Additional ScholarlaryArticle "Journal" costs: moderation, BinderHub / JupyterLite white label SaaS?, hosting data and archived reproducible container images on IPFS and academictorrents and Git LFS, hosting {SQL, SPARQL, GraphQL,} queries and/or a SOLID HTTPS REST API and/or RSS feeds with dynamic content but static feed item URIs and/or ActivityStreams and/or https://schema.org/Action & InteractAction & https://schema.org/ReviewAction & ClaimReview fact check reviews, W3C Web Notifications, CRM + emailing list, keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers,
#LinkedData for #LinkedResearch: Dokieli, parsing https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle citation styles,
> keeping a legit cohort of impactful peer reviewers, [who are time-constrained and unpaid, as well]
"Ask HN: How are online communities established?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24443965 re: building community, MCOS Marginal Cost of Service, CLV Customer Lifetime Value, etc
White House Launches US Digital Corps
I've worked with state government as a volunteer advisor. They're still developing everything with waterfall. Only contracting out to big firms, even if it's a small project. Lawmakers and aides sit in a room and write down what is to be done.
That's changing at the federal level. They know they've got a problem. Why shouldn't federal software be as easy to use as the best web software? If you've ever tried to use it you will quickly learn that isn't the case.
Some sites will only work with IE and no other browser. Developers in two years can make a huge difference for making the government be more agile and operate better.
I always suggest joining a local Code For America brigade. Work on a local project and see if it is for you. If you find yourself drawn to it then consider applying for a two year stint with the federal government. You can really make a difference!
> I've worked with state government as a volunteer advisor. They're still developing everything with waterfall. Only contracting out to big firms, even if it's a small project. Lawmakers and aides sit in a room and write down what is to be done.
The US Digital Services Playbook likely needs few modifications for use at state and local levels? https://github.com/usds/playbook#readme
"PLAY 1: Understand what people need" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play1
"PLAY 4: Build the service using agile and iterative practices" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play4
Do [lawmakers and aides] make good "Product Owners", stakeholders, [incentivized, gamified] app feedback capability utilizers? GitLab has Service Desk: you can email into the service desk email without having an account as necessary to create and follow up on [software] issues in GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/Gitea project management sytems.
> That's changing at the federal level. They know they've got a problem. Why shouldn't federal software be as easy to use as the best web software? If you've ever tried to use it you will quickly learn that isn't the case.
"PLAY 3: Make it simple and intuitive" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play3
> Some sites will only work with IE and no other browser. Developers in two years can make a huge difference for making the government be more agile and operate better.
US Web Design Standards https://designsystem.digital.gov/
From https://github.com/uswds/uswds#browser-support :
>> We’ve designed the design system to support older and newer browsers through progressive enhancement. The current major version of the design system (2.0) follows the 2% rule: we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov. Currently, this means that the design system version 2.0 supports the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 11 and up.
> I always suggest joining a local Code For America brigade. Work on a local project and see if it is for you. If you find yourself drawn to it then consider applying for a two year stint with the federal government. You can really make a difference!
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_for_America :
>> [...] described Code for America as "the technology world's equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America". The article goes on to say, "They bring fresh blood to the solution process, deliver agile coding and software development skills, and frequently offer new perspectives on the latest technology—something that is often sorely lacking from municipal government IT programs. This is a win-win for cities that need help and for technologists that want to give back and contribute to lower government costs and the delivery of improved government service."
Launch HN: Litnerd (YC S21) – Teaching kids to read with the help of live actors
Hi HN, my name is Anisa and I am the founder of Litnerd (https://litnerd.com/), an online reading program designed to teach elementary school students in America how to read.
There are 37M elementary school students in America. Schools spend $20B on reading and supplemental education programs. Yet 42% of 4th grade students are reading at a 1st or 2nd grade proficiency level! The #1 reason students aren’t reading? They say it’s boring. We change that by bringing books to life. Think your favorite book turned into a tv-show style episode-by-episode reenactment, coupled with a complete curriculum and lesson plans.
1 in 8 Americans is functionally illiterate. Like any skill, reading is a habit. If you grew up in a household where you did not see your parents reading, you likely do not develop the habit. This correlates to the socio-economic divide. Two thirds of American students who lack reading skills by the end of fourth grade will rely on welfare as adults. To impact this, research suggests that we need to start at the earliest years.
I am passionate about the research in support of art and theatre as well as story-telling to improve childhood learning. Litnerd is the marriage of these interests. The inspiration comes from Sesame Street and Hamilton The Musical. In the late 60s, Joan Cooney decided to produce a children’s TV show that would influence children across America to learn to read—it became Sesame Street. Cooney researched her idea extensively, consulting with sociologists and scientists, and found that TV’s stickiness can be an important tool for education. Lin-Manuel Miranda took the story of Alexander Hamilton and brought it to life as a musical. Kids have learned more about Hamilton’s history thanks to Hamilton the Musical than any of their textbooks. In fact, this was the case so much that a program called EduHam is used to teach history in middle schools across the nation. When I heard that, the lightbulb went off and I decided to go all in on starting Litnerd.
We hire art and theatre professionals to recreate scenes directly from books in episode style format to bring the book to life, in a similar fashion to watching your favorite TV shows. We literally lead 'read out loud' in the classroom while the teacher/actor is acting out the main character in the book. We have a weekly designated Litnerd period in the schools/classes we serve and we live-stream in our teachers/actors for an interactive session (the students participate and read live with the actor as well as complete written lesson plans, phonetic exercises etc). We are currently serving 14,000 students in this manner.
The format of our program is such that if you don't complete the assigned reading and worksheets, you will feel like you are missing out on what is happening in later episodes. In this way, reading is layered in as a fundamental core to the program. Our program is part of scheduled classroom time.
A big part of our business involves curating content and materials that capture the interest and coolness-factor for elementary school students. We’ve found that students love choose-your-own-adventure style stories, especially ones involving mythical creatures—something about being able to have autonomy on the outcomes. So far, it seems to be working. We've even received fan mail from students! But we are obsessed with staying cool/relevant in our content.
Teachers like our product because it eases the burden placed on them. US teachers typically spend 4 to 10 hours a week (unpaid) planning their curriculum and $400-800 of their own money for classroom supplies. That's outrageous! When designing Litnerd, we wanted to ensure our product was not adding more work to their plate. Our programs are led by our own Resident Teaching Artists, who are live streamed into the classroom and remain in character to the episode as they teach the Litnerd curriculum built on top of the books. Our programs come with lesson plans, activity packets, curriculum correlations, educator resources, and complete ebooks.
Traditional K-12 education has extremely long sale cycles and is hard to break into. It can take years to become a contracted vendor, especially with large districts like NYC Department of Education. Because of my experience with my first YC backed startup that sold to government and nonprofits, coupled with my experience working at a large edtech company that built content for Higher Ed, I understand this sector and how to navigate the budget line item process.
Since launching in January, we have become contracted vendors with the New York City Department of Education (the largest education district in America). As a result, we’ve been growing at 60% MoM, are currently used by over 14k students in their classrooms and hit $110K in ARR. Our program is part of scheduled classroom time for elementary schools—not homework, and not extracurricular. Here’s a walkthrough video from a teacher’s perspective: https://www.loom.com/share/9ffc59f0d7ed4a66964003703bba7b94.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to share our story and mission with you. If you loved or struggled with reading as a kid, what factors do you think contributed? Also, if you have experience teachIng Elementary School or if you are a parent, I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how you foster reading amongst your students/children! I am excited to hear your feedback and ideas to help us inspire the next generation of readers.
This looks like a really thoughtful resource, and I can tell you are hitting all the right marks when it comes to getting this into classrooms. As a first grade teacher, however, I all curious how you see Litnerd fitting into a balanced literacy program. In browsing your programs, I see language comprehension and social emotional learning but no phonics or phonemic awareness. Do you have plans to support these crucial reading skills as well?
I'm thrilled to have our first elementary school teacher comment!! Yes! We have a team of educators and curriculum writers (broken up by Grades PreK-K, 1-2 and 3-5) that follow Common Core standards and build custom ELA curriculum on top of each book and Litnerd program. We provide 2 lesson plans per week and a total of 8 lesson plans per program. We also create SEL lessons (again, based on the book) that follow NYSED competencies and 'Leader in Me' program language (since that is what most of our schools currently use for SEL). We hope to continue to improve overtime and I would definitely any feedback for us as we grow intros area!
TIL a new acronym word symbol lexeme: SEL: Social and Emotional Learning
> Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is an education practice that integrates social emotional skills into school curriculum. SEL is otherwise referred to as "socio-emotional learning" or "social-emotional literacy." When in practice, social emotional learning has equal emphasis on social and emotional skills to other subjects such as math, science, and reading.[1] The five main components of social emotional learning are self-awareness, self management, social awareness, responsible decision making, and relationship skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_Emotional_Learning
For good measure, Common Core English Language Arts standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_In...
Khan Academy has 2nd-9th Grade ELA exercises: English & Language Arts: https://www.khanacademy.org/ela
Unfortunately AFAIU there's not a good way to explore the Khan Academy Kids curriculum graph; which definitely does include reading: https://learn.khanacademy.org/khan-academy-kids/
> The app engages kids in core subjects like early literacy, reading, writing, language, and math, while encouraging creativity and building social-emotional skills
In terms of Phonemic awareness and Phonological awareness, is there a good a survey of US and World reading programs and their evidence-based basis, if any??
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_awareness :
> Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest mental units of sound that help to differentiate units of meaning (morphemes). Separating the spoken word "cat" into three distinct phonemes, /k/, /æ/, and /t/, requires phonemic awareness. The National Reading Panel has found that phonemic awareness improves children's word reading and reading comprehension and helps children learn to spell.[1] Phonemic awareness is the basis for learning phonics.[2]
> Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are often confused since they are interdependent. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes. *Phonological awareness includes this ability, but it also includes the ability to hear and manipulate larger units of sound, such as onsets and rimes and syllables.*
What are some of the more evidence-based (?) (early literacy,) reading curricula? OTOH: LETRS, Heggerty, PAL: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+%22l...
Looks like Cambium acquired e.g. Kurzweil Education in 2005?
More context:
Reading readiness in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_readiness_in_the_Unite...
Emergent literacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_literacies
An interactive IPA chart with videos and readings linked with RDF (e.g. ~WordNet RDF) would be great. From "Duolingo's language notes all on one page" https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-26430146 :
> An IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) reference would be helpful, too. After taking linguistics in college, I found these Sozo videos of US english IPA consonants and vowels that simultaneously show {the ipa symbol, example words, someone visually and auditorily producing the phoneme from 2 angles, and the spectrogram of the waveform} but a few or a configurable number of [spaced] repetitions would be helpful: https://youtu.be/Sw36F_UcIn8
> IDK how cartoonish or 3d of an "articulatory phonetic" model would reach the widest audience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics
> IPA chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
> IPA chart with audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
> All of the IPA consonant chart played as a video: "International Phonetic Alphabet Consonant sounds (Pulmonic)- From Wikipedia.org" https://youtu.be/yFAITaBr6Tw
> I'll have to find the link of the site where they playback youtube videos with multiple languages' subtitles highlighted side-by-side along with the video.
>> [...] Found it: https://www.captionpop.com/
>> It looks like there are a few browser extensions for displaying multiple subtitles as well; e.g. "YouTube Dual Subtitles", "Two Captions for YouTube and Netflix"
Phonics programs really could reference IPA from the start: there are different sounds for the same letters; IPA is the most standard way to indicate how to pronounce words: it's in the old school dictionary, and now it's in the Google "define:" or just "define word" dictionary.
UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education: https://www.globalgoals.org/4-quality-education
> Target 4.6: Universal Literacy and Numeracy
> By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy.
https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4 :
> Indicator 4.6.1: Percentage of population in a given age group achieving at least a fixed level of proficiency in functional (a) literacy and (b) numeracy skills, by sex
... Goals, Targets, and Indicators.
Which traversals of a curriculum graph are optimal or sufficient?
You can add https://schema.org/about and https://schema.org/educationalAlignment Linked Data to your [#OER] curriculum resources to increase discoverability, reusability.
Arne-Thompson-Uther Index code URN URIs could be helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%9...
> The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index) is a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies.
Are there competencies linked to maybe a nested outline that we typically traverse in depth-first order? https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt : Todo.txt format has +succinct @context labels. Some way to record and score our own paths objectively would be great.
> What are some of the more evidence-based (?) (early literacy,) reading curricula? OTOH: LETRS, Heggerty, PAL
Looks like there are only 21 search results for: "LETRS" "Fundation" "Heggerty": https://www.google.com/search?q="LETRS"+"fundation"+"heggert...
What is the name for this category of curricula?
Perhaps the US Department of Education or similar could compare early reading programs in a wiki[pedia] page, according to criteria to include measures of evidence-basedness? Just like https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/ has "aggregate data for each institution [&] Includes information on institutional characteristics, enrollment, student aid, costs, and student outcomes."
From YouTube, it looks like there are cool hand motions for Heggerty.
Nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim
awesome-selfhosted > "Communication - Social Networks and Forums" doesn't yet link to Nimforum: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#com...
An Opinionated Guide to Xargs
Wanting verbose logging from xargs, years ago I wrote a script called `el` (edit lines) that basically does `xargs -0` with logging. https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/e...
It turns out that e.g. -print0 and -0 are the only safe way: line endings aren't escaped:
find . -type f -print0 | el -0 --each -x echo
(author here) Hm I don't see either of these points because:
GNU xargs has --verbose which logs every command. Does that not do what you want? (Maybe I should mention its existence in the post)
xargs -P can do everything GNU parallel do, which I mention in the post. Any counterexamples? GNU parallel is a very ugly DSL IMO, and I don't see what it adds.
--
edit: Logging can also be done with by recursively invoking shell functions that log with the $0 Dispatch Pattern, explained in the post. I don't see a need for another tool; this is the Unix philosophy and compositionality of shell at work :)
Parallel's killer feature is how it spools subprocess output, ensuring that it doesn't get jumbled together. xargs can't do that. I use parallel for things like shelling out to 10000 hosts and getting some statistics. If I use xargs the output stomps all over itself.
Ah OK thanks, I responded to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28259473
As far as I'm aware, xargs still has the problem of multiple jobs being able to write to stdout at the same time, potentially causing their output streams to be intermingled. Compare this with parallels --group.
Also parallels can run some of those threads on remote machines. I don't believe xargs has an equivalent job management function.
In your examples you fail to put 'xargs -P' in the middle of a pipeline: You only put it at the end.
In other words:
some command | xargs -P other command | third command
UNIX is great in that you can pipe commands together, but due to the interleaving issue 'xargs -P' fails here. It does not live up to the UNIX philosophy. Which is probably why you unconsciously only use it at the end of a pipeline.
You can find a different counterexample on https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405552/using-xargs-... I will be impressed if you can implement that using xargs. Especially if you can make it more clean than the paralel version.
[deleted]
Yeah but xargs doesn't refuse to run until I have agreed to a EULA stating I will cite it in my next academic paper.
parallel doesn't either, it just nags. I agree about how silly and annoying it is. Imagine if every time the parallel author opened Firefox he got a message reminding him to personally thank me if he uses his web browser for research, or if every time his research program calls malloc he has to acknowledge and cite Ulrich Drepper. Very very silly.
Parallel is the better tool but the nagware impairs its reputation.
Enhanced Support for Citations on GitHub
> CITATION.cff files are plain text files with human- and machine-readable citation information. When we detect a CITATION.cff file in a repository, we use this information to create convenient APA or BibTeX style citation links that can be referenced by others.
https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle RDFa and JSON-LD can be parsed with a standard Linked Data parser. Looks like YAML-LD requires quoting e.g. "@context": and "@id":
From https://docs.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archi... ; in your repo's /CITATION.cff:
cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "If you use this software, please cite it as below."
authors:
- family-names: "Lisa"
given-names: "Mona"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"
- family-names: "Bot"
given-names: "Hew"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"
title: "My Research Software"
version: 2.0.4
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1234
date-released: 2017-12-18
url: "https://github.com/github/linguist"
Canada calls screen scraping ‘unsecure,’ sets Open Banking target for 2023
It's about time. When I learned that applications like YNAB (You Need A Budget) use services like Plaid to connect to my bank account, and that these services literally take my username and password and impersonate me to get my banking data, I was a little sketched out. I use YNAB every day, and having it connected to my bank account is incredibly useful, but if something goes wrong and Plaid loses my money somehow, is there any recourse?
Hopefully individuals will be able to use the Open Banking APIs to access their own data directly, but it looks like accreditation will be required, so probably not.
Here's the full text of the report: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/programs/consult...
Plaid is only one security breach away from being utterly destroyed. And they will take out the financial lives of all their customers with them.
It’s utterly irresponsible and I have no idea how Plaid hasn’t been shut down. You have no recourse if they are breached. The TOS of your online banking probably says that if you disclose your username and password to any third party then you have no liability protections.
This is FUD. Lots of Plaid-based connections only allow reads. This is a regulated industry, and the fallout reputationally might be tough, but consumers are well-protected.
How is that enforced? What is the technical basis that enforces read-only access using user/password auth? Especially since that user/password auth is used by an end user to do "write"-type actions?
Read-only access is not possible. By handing over the credentials you are handing over write access. You are correct.
A couple of my banking institutions let me generate a read-only set of credentials for this sort of purpose.
Citi and Capital One have OAuth flows that Plaid supports, too, which tends to make me angrier at the banks than Plaid; the need for this stuff has been clear for a decade now, but only a few have added OAuth or similar.
AFAIU, there are still zero (0) consumer banking APIs with Read-Only e.g. OAuth APIs in the US as well?
Banks could save themselves CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and liability by implementing read-only API tokens and methods that need only return JSON - instead of HTML or worse, monthly PDF tables for a fee - possibly similar to the Plaid API: https://plaid.com/docs/api/
There is competition in consumer/retail banking, but still the only way to do e.g. budget and fraud analysis with third party apps is to give away all authentication factors: u/p/sqa; and TBH that's unacceptable.
Traditional and distributed ledger service providers might also consider W3C ILP: Interledger Protocol (in starting their move to quantum-resistant ledgers by 2022 in order to have a 5 year refresh cycle before QC is a real risk by 2027, optimistically, for science) when reviewing the entropy of username+password_hash+security_question_answer strings in comparison to the entropy of cryptoasset account public key hash strings: https://interledger.org/developer-tools/get-started/overview...
> Sender – Initiates a value transfer.
> Router (Connector) – Applies currency exchange and forwards packets of value. This is an intermediary node between the sender and the receiver. {MSB: KYC, AML, 10k reporting requirement, etc}
> Receiver – Receives the value
Multifactor authentication: Something you have, something you know, something you are
Multisig: n-of-m keys required to approve a transaction
Edit: from "Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109576 :
> For purposes of Interledger, we call all settlement systems ledgers. These can include banks, blockchains, peer-to-peer payment schemes, automated clearing house (ACH), mobile money institutions, central-bank operated real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, and even more. […]
> You can envision the Interledger as a graph where the points are individual nodes and the edges are accounts between two parties. Parties with only one account can send or receive through the party on the other side of that account. Parties with two or more accounts are connectors, who can facilitate payments to or from anyone they're connected to.
> Connectors [AKA routers] provide a service of forwarding packets and relaying money, and they take on some risk when they do so. In exchange, connectors can charge fees and derive a profit from these services. In the open network of the Interledger, connectors are expected to compete among one another to offer the best balance of speed, reliability, coverage, and cost.
W3C ILP: Interledger Protocol > Peering, Clearing and Settling: https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen...
> Hopefully individuals will be able to use the Open Banking APIs to access their own data directly, but it looks like accreditation will be required, so probably not.
When you loan your money to a bank by depositing ledger dollars or cash - and they, since GLBA in 1999, invest it and offer less than a 1% checking interest rate - and they won't even give you the record of all of your transactions as CSV/OFX `SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE account_id=?`, you have to pay $20/mo per autogenerated PDF containing a table of transactions to scrape with e.g. PDFminer (because they don't keep all account history data online)?
Seemingly OT, but not. APIs for comparison here:
FinTS / HBCI: Home Banking Computer Information protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS
E.g. GNUcash (open source double-entry accounting software) supports HBCI (and QIF (Quicken format), and OFX (Open Financial Exchange)). https://www.gnucash.org/features.phtml
HBCI/FinTS has been around in Germany for quite awhile but nowhere else has comparable banking standards? I.e. Plaid may (unfortunately, due to lack of read-only tokens across the entire US consumer banking industry) be the most viable option for implementing HBCI-like support in GNUcash
OpenBanking API Specifications: https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/api-specifications/
Web3 (Ethereum,) APIs: https://web3py.readthedocs.io/en/stable/web3.main.html#rpc-a...
ISO20022 is "A single standardisation approach (methodology, process, repository) to be used by all financial standards initiatives" https://www.iso20022.org/
Brazil's PIX is one of the first real implementers of ISO20022. A note regarding such challenges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104351
What data format does the FTC CAT Consolidated Audit Trail expect to receive mandatory financial reporting information in? Could ILP simplify banking and financial reporting at all?
FWIU, RippleNet (?) is the only network that supports attachments of e.g. line-item invoices (that we'd all like to see in the interest of transparency and accountability in government spending).
W3C ILP: Interledger Protocol. See links above.
Of the specs in this loose category, only cryptoledgers do not depend upon (DNS or) TLS/SSL - at the protocol layer, at least - and every CA in the kept-up-to-date trusted CA cert bundle (that could be built from a CT Certificate Transparency log of cert issuance and revocation events kept in a blockchain or e.g. centralized google/trillian, which they have the trusted sole root and backup responsibilities for).
Though, the DNS dependency has probably crept back into e.g. the bitcoind software by now (which used to bootstrap its list of peer nodes (~UNL) from an IRC IP address instead of a DNS domain).
FWIU, each trusted ACH (US 'Direct Deposit') party has a (one) GPG key that they use to sign transaction documents sent over now (S)FTP on scout's honor - on behalf of all of their customers' accounts.
Interactive Linear Algebra (2019)
For those interested in these kinds of interractive math experiences, I have been keeping track of them for a while. Here is my list so far:
• https://www.intmath.com/ - Interactive Mathematics Learn math while you play with it
• http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ - up and down the ladder of abstraction
• https://betterexplained.com/ - Intuitive guides to various things in math
• https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-probability-graphs - Viewing Matrices & Probability as Graphs
• http://immersivemath.com/ila/index.html - immersive linear alg
https://github.com/topics/linear-algebra?l=jupyter+notebook lists "Computational Linear Algebra for Coders" https://github.com/fastai/numerical-linear-algebra
"site:GitHub.com inurl:awesome linear algebra jupyter" lists a few awesome lists with interactive linear algebra resources: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agithub.com+inurl%3Aaw...
3blue1brown's "Essence of linear algebra" playlist has some excellent tutorials with intuition-building visualizations built with manim: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFit...
Git password authentication is shutting down
I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic terminal commands, GitHub, git and its most common commands. It took about 3 hours for us to get through just the most basic pieces. Adding on ssh-keygen, key management adds even more friction.
It's certainly a difficult problem. How can we offer a more gentle learning curve for budding developers while still requiring "real" projects to use best practices for security and development?
I also have found teaching someone how to be even marginally capable of contributing to a Github project from scratch to be a very time consuming and frustrating thing. Think, having your graphics designer able to make commits, or having someone who only wants to update docs.
The worst part is the "easier" solutions are actually just footguns in disguise, as soon as they accidentally click the wrong thing and end up with a detached HEAD, a few commits ahead and behind the REMOTE, and halfway through a botched merge, you have to figure out how to bail them out of that using a GUI you've never actually used. Knowing all this, you either teach them git (high short term pain, high chance of them just giving up immediately) or you tell them to download the first result for "windows foss git gui" and pray that history won't repeat itself.
The solution that everyone actually uses until they learn the unnecessary details is "take a backup of relevant files and blow away & redownload the repo".
wait there is another way?
git stash
git reset --hard master
git pull
git stash popUh oh, you've now merged remote master into your local master which was two commits ahead and 3 behind!
My git config has fast-forward only for pulls and I habitually use --ff-only for any pull :)
The command you want is "git pull --rebase". There are configuration settings to make "git pull" rebase by default, and I'd recommend always turning that on that default (which may be by why the person above omitted it from his pull command).
I actually thought "git pull" did "git pull --rebase" by default (this may be what you get from running `git --configure` without modifications?), but maybe I've just been configuring it that way. You can achieve this in your global Git configuration by setting "pull.rebase" to "true".
I don't think it's sane behavior for "git pull" to do anything else besides rebase the local change onto the upstream branch, so I'm surprised it's not the command's default behavior. Has the project not changed the CLI for compatibility reasons or something?
When do you ever want a "git pull" that's not a rebase? That generates a merge commit saying "Merge master into origin/master" (or something similar) which is stupid. If you really want to use actual branches for some reason, that's fine, but "merge master into master" commits are an anti-pattern that if I ever see in a Git repository I'm working on or responsible for, results in me having a conversation with the author about how to use Git correctly.
I actually don't want to rebase. Rebase can rewrite your local history and make it impossible for you to push without doing a force push (or some other more complicated manuevering). The only time pull with rebase is okay (on a shared branch such as master) is when you know that your local branch is strictly behind remote. That's exactly what --ff-only does. It rebases only if you are behind remote, and declines to do so if you are ahead so you can sort your shit out without rewriting history.
If "git pull --rebase" succeeds without reporting a merge conflict, then it's tantamount to having executed the command with "--ff-only".
I believe you are incorrect however. "git pulll --rebase" will not ever rewrite history from the origin repository. It will only ever modify your local unpublished commits to account for new commits from the origin branch. If your change and the new commits from origin aren't touching the same lines or files, then the update is seamless [1].
If there is a conflict because your change and a new commit from origin both changed the same line in the same file, this can result in a merge commit that you need to resolve. But you resolve this locally, by updating your (unpushed, local) commit(s) to account for the new history. When you complete the merge, it will not show up as a merge commit in the repository -- you will simply have simply amended your local unpublished commit(s) only to account for the changes in upstream, and you will have seen every conflict and resolved each one yourself. When the process is complete, and you've resolved the merge, you'll have a nice linear branch where your commit(s) are on the tip of the origin branch.
The flag "--ff-only" basically just means "refuse to start a local merge while performing this operation, and instead fail".
Because of the potential for these merge conflicts, it's a best practice to "git pull" frequently, so that if there are conflicts you can deal with them incrementally (and possibly discuss the software design with coworkers/project partners if the design is beginning to diverge -- and so people can coordinate what they're working on and try to stay out of each other's way), instead of working through a massive pile of conflicts at the end of your "local 'branch'" (i.e. the code in your personal Git repo that constitutes unpushed commits to the upstream branch).
Additionally, all of the central Git repositories I've worked in in a professional context were also configured to disallow "git push --force" (a command that can rewrite history), for all "real" branches. These systems gave users their own private Git repo sandbox (just like you can fork a repo on GitHub) where they can force push if they want to (but is backed up centrally like GitHub to avoid the loss of work). This personal repo was very useful for saving my work. I was in the habit of committing and pushing to the private repo about once every 30m-1h (to eliminate the chance of major work loss due to hardware failure). Almost always I'd squash all of these commits into one before rebasing onto master, so that the change comes in as a single commit, unless it would be too large to review.
In the occasional circumstances where I've legitimately needed to rewrite history for some reason -- say credentials got into the repository, or someone generated one of these "merge master into master" commits -- then I would change HEAD from master to another branch, delete master, and then recreate it with the desired state. (And even that operation would show up in the system's logs, so in the case of something like credentials you'd additionally contact the security or source control team to make sure the commit objects containing the credentials were actually deleted out of the repo history completely, including stuff you can find only via the reflog.) Then contact the team working on the repo to let them know that you had to rewrite history to correct a problem.
I would recommend disabling "git push --force" for all collaborative projects. If you're operating the repository, you can do this by invoking "git config --system receive" and setting "denyNonFastForwards true". In GitHub there's probably a repository setting switch somewhere.
Once professional software engineers start working with Git all day long, they quickly get past the beginner stage and the need to do this kind of stuff is very rare.
[1] It doesn't mean the software will work though, even if both changes would have worked in isolation. You still need to inspect and test the results of "git pull (--ff-only)", since even if there are no conflicts like commits that modify the same lines as yours, or there are conflicts that Git can resolve automatically, it's possible for the resultant software logic to be defective, since Git has no semantic understanding of the code.
`git pull --rebase` usually is what I need to do. To save local changes and rebase to the git remote's branch:
# git branch -av;
# git remote -v;
# git reflog; git help reflog; man git-reflog
# git show HEAD@{0}
# git log -n5 --graph;
git add -A; git status;
git stash; git stash list;
git pull --rebase;
#git pull --rebase origin develop
# git fetch origin develop
# git rebase origin/develop
git stash pop;
git stash list;
git status;
# git commit
# git rebase -i HEAD~5 # squash
# git push
There's a way to default to --rebase for pulls: is there a reason not to set that in a global gitconfig? Edit: From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13846300/how-to-make-git... :
> There are now 3 different levels of configuration for default pull behaviour. From most general to most fine grained they are: […]
git config --global pull.rebase trueMaybe start here: http://learngitbranching.js.org/
GitHub Learning Lab: https://lab.github.com/
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/git/ #Further_resources
A future for SQL on the web
What's kind of bonkers here is that IndexedDB uses sqlite as its backend. So, this is sqlite (WASM) -> IndexedDB -> sqlite (native).
The Internet is a wild place...
I'm going to build a business that offers SQLite as a web service. It will be backed by a P2P network of browser instances storing data in IndexedDB. Taking investment now.
TIL, about Graph "Protocol for building decentralized applications quickly on Ethereum" https://github.com/graphprotocol
https://thegraph.com/docs/indexing
> Indexers are node operators in The Graph Network that stake Graph Tokens (GRT) in order to provide indexing and query processing services. Indexers earn query fees and indexing rewards for their services. They also earn from a Rebate Pool that is shared with all network contributors proportional to their work, following the Cobbs-Douglas Rebate Function.
> GRT that is staked in the protocol is subject to a thawing period and can be slashed if Indexers are malicious and serve incorrect data to applications or if they index incorrectly. Indexers can also be delegated stake from Delegators, to contribute to the network.
> Indexers select subgraphs to index based on the subgraph’s curation signal, where Curators stake GRT in order to indicate which subgraphs are high-quality and should be prioritized. Consumers (eg. applications) can also set parameters for which Indexers process queries for their subgraphs and set preferences for query fee pricing.
It's Ethereum though, so it's LevelDB, not SQLite on IndexedDB on SQLite.
Show HN: Python Source Code Refactoring Toolkit via AST
A similar type project. Though I haven't seen much activity recently:
I haven't used bowler, but from what I can see it is using lib2to3 (through fissix), which can't parse newer Python code (parenthesized context managers, new pattern matching statement etc.) due to it being using a LL(1) parser. The regular ast on the other hand is always compatible with the current grammar, since that is what CPython internally consumes. It is also more handy to work with since majority of the linters already using it, so it would be very easy to port rules.
(Author of Bowler/maintainer of fissix)
The main concern with using the ast module from stdlib is that you lose all formatting/whitespace/comments in your syntax tree, so writing any changes back to the original sources requires doing a lot more extra work to preserve the original formatting, put back comments, etc. This is entire point of lib2to3/fissix and LibCST, allowing large scale CST manipulation while preserving all of those comments and formatting. We do recognize the limitations of lib2to3/fissix, though, so there have been some backburner plans to move Bowler onto LibCST, as well as building a PEG-based parser for LibCST specifically to enable support for 3.10 and future syntax/grammar changes. But of course, this is very difficult to give any ETA or target for release.
Did you consider PyCQA/RedBaron (which is based upon PyCQA/baron, an AST implementation which preserves comments and whitespace)? https://redbaron.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
It was considered, but the initial goals of Bowler was to a) build on top of lib2to3 in an attempt to get broader upstream support for maintaining it as an "official" cst module, which fizzled out, and b) to use some of the more complex matching semantics that lib2to3 enabled, which baron and other cst alternatives don't really attempt to cover.
Things like "find any function that uses kwargs" or "find any class that defines a method named `bar`" can be easily expressed with lib2to3's matching grammar, and no other CST that I'm aware of (that isn't itself based on lib2to3) has equivalent functionality. This is something we wanted to add to LibCST, but haven't had the time to focus on given other priorities. Meanwhile, we used LibCST to write a safer alternative to isort: https://usort.readthedocs.io
Rog. I think CodeQL (GitHub acquired Semmle and QL in 2019) supports those types of queries; probably atop lib2to3 as well. https://codeql.github.com/docs/writing-codeql-queries/introd...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511280 :
> Additional lists of static analysis, dynamic analysis, SAST, DAST, and other source code analysis tools […]
Emacs' org-mode gets citation support
FWIW, Jupyter-book handles Citations and bibliographies with sphinxcontrib-bibtex: https://jupyterbook.org/content/citations.html
Some notes about Zotero and Schema.org RDFa for publishing [CSL with citeproc] citations: references of Linked Data resources in a graph, with URIs all: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/tools/index#zotero-and-schema-o...
Compared to trying to parse beautifully typeset bibliographies in PDFs built from LaTeX with a Computer Modern font, search engines can more easily index e.g. https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle linked data as RDFa, Microdata, or JSON-LD.
Scholarly search engines: Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, Meta.org,
NSA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [pdf]
- Scan containers and Pods for vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
- Run containers and Pods with the least privileges possible.
- Use network separation to control the amount of damage a compromise can cause.
- Use firewalls to limit unneeded network connectivity and encryption to protect confidentiality.
- Use strong authentication and authorization to limit user and administrator access as well as to limit the attack surface.
- Use log auditing so that administrators can monitor activity and be alerted to potential malicious activity.
- Periodically review all Kubernetes settings and use vulnerability scans to help ensure risks are appropriately accounted for and security patches are applied.
> and encryption to protect confidentiality
Probably the hardest part about this. Private networks with private domains. Who runs the private CA, updates DNS records, issues certs, revokes, keeps the keys secure, embeds the keychain in every container's cert stack, and enforces validation?
That is a shit-ton of stuff to set up (and potentially screw up) which will take a small team probably months to complete. How many teams are actually going to do this, versus just terminating at the load balancer and everything in the cluster running plaintext?
> That is a shit-ton of stuff to set up (and potentially screw up) which will take a small team probably months to complete.
Agree! This is why that "Kubernetes Hardening Guidance" is for NSA, not for startups.
Resource needs aside, keeping basic AppSec/InfoSec hygiene is a strong recommendation. Also there are tons of startups that are trying to provide solutions/services to solve that also. A lot of times, it's worth the money.
This guidance is provided by the NSA, not for the NSA.
From the doc:
>It includes hardening strategies to avoid common misconfigurations and guide system administrators and developers of National Security Systems on how to deploy Kubernetes...
Also:
> Purpose > NSA and CISA developed this document in furtherance of their respective cybersecurity missions, including their responsibilities to develop and issue cybersecurity specifications and mitigations. This information may be shared broadly to reach all appropriate stakeholders.
NSA has multiple mandates and many stakeholders.
Looks like there's actually a "summary of the key recommendations from each section" on page 2.
> Works cited:
> [1] Center for Internet Security, "Kubernetes," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://cisecurity.org/resources/?type=benchmark&search=kube... .
> [2] DISA, "Kubernetes STIG," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://dl.dod.cyber.mil.wp- content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Kubernetes_V1R1_STIG.zip. [Accessed 8 July 2021]
> [3] The Linux Foundation, "Kubernetes Documentation," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/ . [Accessed 8 July 2021].
> [4] The Linux Foundation, "11 Ways (Not) to Get Hacked," 18 07 2018. [Online]. Available: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/07/18/11-ways-not-to-get-hac... . [Accessed 8 July 2021].
> [5] MITRE, "Unsecured Credentials: Cloud Instance Metadata API." MITRE ATT&CK, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1552/005/. [Accessed 8 July 2021].
> [6] CISA, "Analysis Report (AR21-013A): Strengthening Security Configurations to Defend Against Attackers Targeting Cloud Services." Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 14 January 2021. [Online]. Available:https://us- cert.cisa.gov/ncas/analysis-reports/ar21-013a [Accessed 8 July 2021].
How can k8s and zero-trust cooccur?
> CISA encourages administrators and organizations review NSA’s guidance on Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model to help secure sensitive data, systems, and services.
"Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model" (2021, as well) https://media.defense.gov/2021/Feb/25/2002588479/-1/-1/0/CSI...
In addition to "zero [trust]", I also looked for the term "SBOM". From p.32//39:
> As updates are deployed, administrators should also keep up with removing any old components that are no longer needed from the environment. Using a managed Kubernetes service can help to automate upgrades and patches for Kubernetes, operating systems, and networking protocols. *However, administrators must still patch and upgrade their containerized applications.*
"Existing artifact vuln scanners, databases, and specs?" https://github.com/google/osv/issues/55
Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages
That's one lovely trick.
If I may suggest one thing... instead of range requests on a single huge file how about splitting the file in 1-page fragments in separate files and fetching them individually? This buys you caching (e.g. on CDNs) and compression (that you could also perform ahead of time), both things that are somewhat tricky with a single giant file and range requests.
With the reduction in size you get from compression, you can also use larger pages almost for free, potentially further decreasing the number of roundtrips.
There's also a bunch of other things that could be tried later, like using a custom dictionary for compressing the individual pages.
I think that's the core innovation here, smart HTTP block storage.
I wonder if there has been any research into optimizing all http range requests at the client level in a similar way. i.e. considering the history of requests on a particular url and doing the same predictive exponential requests, or grabbing the full file asynchronously at a certain point.
> Methods for remotely accessing/paging data in from a client when a complete download of the dataset is unnecessary:
> - Query e.g. parquet on e.g. GitHub with DuckDB: duckdb/test_parquet_remote.test https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/6c7c9805fdf1604039ebed...
> - Query sqlite on e.g. GitHub with SQLite: [Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages - (or any static file hoster) - phiresky's blog](...)
>> The above query should do 10-20 GET requests, fetching a total of 130 - 270KiB, depending on if you ran the above demos as well. Note that it only has to do 20 requests and not 270 (as would be expected when fetching 270 KiB with 1 KiB at a time). That’s because I implemented a pre-fetching system that tries to detect access patterns through three separate virtual read heads and exponentially increases the request size for sequential reads. This means that index scans or table scans reading more than a few KiB of data will only cause a number of requests that is logarithmic in the total byte length of the scan. You can see the effect of this by looking at the “Access pattern” column in the page read log above.
> - bittorrent/sqltorrent https://github.com/bittorrent/sqltorrent
>> Sqltorrent is a custom VFS for sqlite which allows applications to query an sqlite database contained within a torrent. Queries can be processed immediately after the database has been opened, even though the database file is still being downloaded. Pieces of the file which are required to complete a query are prioritized so that queries complete reasonably quickly even if only a small fraction of the whole database has been downloaded.
>> […] Creating torrents: Sqltorrent currently only supports torrents containing a single sqlite database file. For efficiency the piece size of the torrent should be kept fairly small, around 32KB. It is also recommended to set the page size equal to the piece size when creating the sqlite database
Would BitTorrent be faster over HTTP/3 (UDP) or is that already a thing for web seeding?
> - https://web.dev/file-system-access/
> The File System Access API: simplifying access to local files: The File System Access API allows web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user’s device
Hadn't seen wilsonzlin/edgesearch, thx:
> Serverless full-text search with Cloudflare Workers, WebAssembly, and Roaring Bitmaps https://github.com/wilsonzlin/edgesearch
>> How it works: Edgesearch builds a reverse index by mapping terms to a compressed bit set (using Roaring Bitmaps) of IDs of documents containing the term, and creates a custom worker script and data to upload to Cloudflare Workers
> Would BitTorrent be faster over HTTP/3 (UDP) or is that already a thing for web seeding?
The BT protocol itself runs on both TCP and UDP, but it has preferred the UDP variant for many years already.
Thanks. There likely are relative advantages to HTTP/3 QUIC. Here's this from Wikipedia:
> Both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 use TCP as their transport. HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a transport layer network protocol which uses user space congestion control over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The switch to QUIC aims to fix a major problem of HTTP/2 called "head-of-line blocking": because the parallel nature of HTTP/2's multiplexing is not visible to TCP's loss recovery mechanisms, a lost or reordered packet causes all active transactions to experience a stall regardless of whether that transaction was impacted by the lost packet. Because QUIC provides native multiplexing, lost packets only impact the streams where data has been lost.
And HTTP Pipelining / Multiplexing isn't specified by just UDP or QUIC:
> HTTP/1.1 specification requires servers to respond to pipelined requests correctly, sending back non-pipelined but valid responses even if server does not support HTTP pipelining. Despite this requirement, many legacy HTTP/1.1 servers do not support pipelining correctly, forcing most HTTP clients to not use HTTP pipelining in practice.
> Time diagram of non-pipelined vs. pipelined connection The technique was superseded by multiplexing via HTTP/2,[2] which is supported by most modern browsers.[3]
> In HTTP/3, the multiplexing is accomplished through the new underlying QUIC transport protocol, which replaces TCP. This further reduces loading time, as there is no head-of-line blocking anymore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining
Ask HN: Any good resources on how to be a great technical advisor to startups?
Bumping up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27600539
## Codelabels: Component: title
### ENH,UBY: HN: linkify URIs in descriptions
## User Stories
Users {__, __, } can ___ in order to ___.
Given-When-Then
~ Who-What-Wow
~ {Marketing, Training, Support, Service} Curriculum Competencies
### Users can click on links in descriptions in order to review referenced off-site resources.
Costs/Benefits: Linkspam?
The URL from this {item,} description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27600539
Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better
git and HTML and Linked Data should be requisite: https://learngitbranching.js.org/
Pedagogy#Modern_pedagogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy#Modern_pedagogy
Evidence-based_education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_education
Computational_thinking#Characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking#Charact... (Abstraction, Automation, Analysis)
Learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning
Autodidacticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism
Design of Experiments; Hypotheses, troubleshooting, debugging, automated testing, Formal Methods, actual Root Cause Analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments
Critical Thinking; definitions, Logic and Rationality, Logical Reasoning: Deduction, Abduction and Induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking#Logic_and_ra...
Doesn't this all derive from [Quantum] Information Theory? It's actually fascinating to start at Information Theory; who knows what that curriculum would look like without reinforcement and [3D] videos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Stone, James V. "Information theory: a tutorial introduction." (2015). https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Information+Theory:+...
It used to be that we had to start engines with a turn of a crank: that initial energy to overcome inertia was enough for the system to feed-forward without additional reinforcement. Effective CS instruction may motivate the unmotivated to care about learning the way folks who are receiving reinforcement do: intrinsically.
Ask HN: Best online speech / public speaking course?
Hi HN - Has anyone taken an online course to help them with public speaking, speech and voice skills that they’d highly recommend? Thanks!
"TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking" https://smile.amazon.com/TED-Talks-Official-Public-Speaking-...
TED Masterclass: https://masterclass.ted.com/
"Power Talk: Using Language to Build Authority and Influence" https://smile.amazon.com/Power-Talk-Language-Authority-Influ...
Re: Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling; listening to metaphors and asking clean questions may be a more effective way to facilitate change: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-15471868
/? greatest speeches: https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=Greatest+...
"Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History" by William Safire. https://a.co/8svyoUw
E.g. "The Prosperity Bible: The Greatest Writings of All Time on the Secrets to Wealth and Prosperity" (Napoleon Hill, PT Barnum, Dale Carnegie, Gibran, Benjamin Franklin; 5000+ pages). https://a.co/b8Ej6o7
Talking points: Peaceful coexistence, #GlobalGoals 1-17 (UN SDGs), "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update" by Donella H. Meadows. https://a.co/7MgO0bv
Google sunsets the APK format for new Android apps
I was just trying to explain this the other day. Not sure whether to be disappointed in is this a regression? No, bros, you may not just `repack it` and re-sign the package for me. That's not how it should work unless I trust their build server to sign for me; and I don't and we shouldn't. I'll just CC this here from https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-27410978 :
```
> Unfortunately all packages aren't necessarily signed either; "Which package managers require packages to be cryptographically signed?" is similar to "Which DNS clients can operate DNS resolvers that require DNSSEC signatures on DNS records to validate against the distributed trust anchors?".
> FWIW, `delv pkg.mirror.server.org` is how you can check DNSSEC:
man systemd-resolved # nmcli
man delv
man dnssec-trust-anchors.d
delv pkg.mirror.server.org
> The TUF Overview explains some of the risks of asset signature systems; key compromise, there's one key for everything that we all share and can't log the revocation of in a CT (Certificate Transparency) log distributed like a DLT, https://theupdateframework.io/overview/
> Certificate Transparency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
> Yeah, there's a channel to secure there at that layer of the software supply chain as well.
> "PEP 480 -- Surviving a Compromise of PyPI: End-to-end signing of packages" (2014-) https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0480/
>> Proposed is an extension to PEP 458 that adds support for end-to-end signing and the maximum security model. End-to-end signing allows both PyPI and developers to sign for the distributions that are downloaded by clients. The minimum security model proposed by PEP 458 supports continuous delivery of distributions (because they are signed by online keys), but that model does not protect distributions in the event that PyPI is compromised. In the minimum security model, attackers who have compromised the signing keys stored on PyPI Infrastructure may sign for malicious distributions. The maximum security model, described in this PEP, retains the benefits of PEP 458 (e.g., immediate availability of distributions that are uploaded to PyPI), but additionally ensures that end-users are not at risk of installing forged software if PyPI is compromised.
> One W3C Linked Data way to handle https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication ( https://codemeta.github.io/user-guide/ ) cryptographic signatures of a JSON-LD manifest with per-file and whole package hashes would be with e.g. W3C ld-signatures/ld-proofs and W3C DID (Decentralized Identifiers) or x.509 certs in a CT log.
```
FWIU, the Fuschia team is building package signing on top of TUF.
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python
This is reminds me of Ken Shirriff's 2014 "Bitcoins the Hard Way" blog post that also used Python to build a Bitcoin transaction from scratch: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi...
(The subtitle of the blog is "Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever" and it is full of fascinating articles, several of which have been featured here on HN)
> The 'dumbcoin' jupyter notebook is also a good reference: "Dumbcoin - An educational python implementation of a bitcoin-like blockchain" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/julienr/ipynb_playground...
https://github.com/yjjnls/awesome-blockchain#implementation-... and https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains#pytho... list a few more ~"blockchain from scratch" [in Python] examples.
... FWIU, Ethereum has the better Python story. There was a reference implementation of Ethereum in Python? https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/programming-language...
An Omega-3 that’s poison for cancer tumors
If you are interested in adding Omega-3 to your stack, make sure it is molecularly distilled fish oil. Otherwise there is the risk of excess lead and mercury.
You can also eat fish that are low on the food chain like sardines.
Fish don't synthesize Omega PUFAs, they eat algae (which unfortunately and inopportunely stains teeth)
From "Warning: Combination of Omega-3s in Popular Supplements May Blunt Heart Benefits" https://scitechdaily.com/warning-combination-of-omega-3s-in-... :
> Now, new research from the Intermountain Healthcare Heart Institute in Salt Lake City finds that higher EPA blood levels alone lowered the risk of major cardiac events and death in patients, while DHA blunted the cardiovascular benefits of EPA. Higher DHA levels at any level of EPA, worsened health outcomes.
> Results of the Intermountain study, which examined nearly 1,000 patients over a 10-year-period,
> “Based on these and other findings, we can still tell our patients to eat Omega-3 rich foods, but we should not be recommending them in pill form as supplements or even as combined (EPA + DHA) prescription products,” he said. “Our data adds further strength to the findings of the recent REDUCE-IT (2018) study that EPA-only prescription products reduce heart disease events.”
Now they're sayin'; so I go look for an EPA-only supplement, and TIL about re-esterified triglyceride and it says it's molecularly distilled anchovies in blister packages. Which early land mammals probably ate, so.
I found this comment too late... Already ordered a "kids" supplement that has a 2:1 ratio of DHA:EPA.
I do not think that you should be much concerned about this, because other studies show that more DHA than EPA is preferable when using other criteria.
So the conclusion is that nobody knows for sure if you should eat more DHA than EPA, to have a better brain, or less DHA than EPA, to have a better heart.
What is certain is that you need some minimum quantity of both DHA and EPA.
Especially for children, who do not have yet to worry about cardio-vascular problems, a supplement with more DHA than EPA seems actually a good choice.
Discover and Prevent Linux Kernel Zero-Day Exploit Using Formal Verification
[Coq, VST, CompCert]
Formal methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
Formal specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification
Implementation of formal specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Software_engineer...
Formal verification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :
> Which universities teach formal methods?
> - q=formal+verification https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+verification
> - q=formal+methods https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+methods
> Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs?
Can there still be side channel attacks in formally verified systems? Can e.g. TLA+ help with that at all?
Formal methods could be used to prevent side channel attacks. However preventing each type of attack requires specifying properties which needs to be proven to assure it is is not possible. I am not very famililiar with TLA+, but I think in general it is not guaranteed to provide side channel attacks, such as based on timing, CPU state, etc.
Anatomy of a Linux DNS Lookup
This predates systemd's decision to get involved via systemd-resolved. So now it's got another step :)
Edit: Well, and also browsers doing DNS over https. It's pretty confusing these days to know which path your app took to resolve a name.
Which is super annoying when you actually want to run a DNS server and have to try and convince systemd-resolved to stay in its own lane.
Is there a good example of a Linux package that does this correctly?
I suspect the big part is putting "DNSStubListener=no" into the [Resolve] section of /etc/systemd/resolved.conf if you want to have something else listening on port 53.
Or you can just mask the service (better than disabling):
systemctl mask systemd-resolved.service
systemctl mask systemd-hostnamed.service
systemctl mask systemd-timesyncd.service
systemctl mask systemd-networkd.service
systemctl mask systemd-homed.serviceYeah, but if you regress to 'legacy DNS' by removing systemd-resolved then there's no good way to do per-interface DNS (~client-split DNS), or (optionally) validate DNSSEC, or do DoH/DoT; and then nothing respawns and logs consistently-timestamped process events of substitute network service processes.
FWIU, per-user DNS configs are still elusive. Per-user DNS would make it easier to use family-safe DNS (that redirects to family-safe e.g. SafeSearch domains) by default; some forums are essential for system administration.
Since nothing in the real world is or ever will be DNSSEC signed anyways, it's not that much of a loss. Meanwhile, the most important DoH user --- your browser --- has DoH baked in and doesn't need systemd-resolved's help.
Your system may also depend upon one or more package managers that do all depend upon DNS (and hopefully e.g. DNSSEC and DoH/DoT)
Package managers don't rely on DNSSEC for package security (it would be deeply problematic if they did). But you can also just go look and see that, for instance, Ubuntu.com isn't signed, nor are most of the Pacman mirrors for Arch, nor is alpinelinux.org, &c. DNSSEC is simply not a factor in package management security.
People have weird ideas about how this stuff works.
Unfortunately all packages aren't necessarily signed either; "Which package managers require packages to be cryptographically signed?" is similar to "Which DNS clients can operate DNS resolvers that require DNSSEC signatures on DNS records to validate against the distributed trust anchors?".
FWIW, `delv pkg.mirror.server.org` is how you can check DNSSEC:
man systemd-resolved # nmcli
man delv
man dnssec-trust-anchors.d
delv pkg.mirror.server.org
The TUF Overview explains some of the risks of asset signature systems; key compromise, there's one key for everything that we all share and can't log the revocation of in a CT (Certificate Transparency) log distributed like a DLT, https://theupdateframework.io/overview/
Certificate Transparency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
Yeah, there's a channel to secure there at that layer of the software supply chain as well.
"PEP 480 -- Surviving a Compromise of PyPI: End-to-end signing of packages" (2014-) https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0480/
> Proposed is an extension to PEP 458 that adds support for end-to-end signing and the maximum security model. End-to-end signing allows both PyPI and developers to sign for the distributions that are downloaded by clients. The minimum security model proposed by PEP 458 supports continuous delivery of distributions (because they are signed by online keys), but that model does not protect distributions in the event that PyPI is compromised. In the minimum security model, attackers who have compromised the signing keys stored on PyPI Infrastructure may sign for malicious distributions. The maximum security model, described in this PEP, retains the benefits of PEP 458 (e.g., immediate availability of distributions that are uploaded to PyPI), but additionally ensures that end-users are not at risk of installing forged software if PyPI is compromised.
One W3C Linked Data way to handle https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication ( https://codemeta.github.io/user-guide/ ) cryptographic signatures of a JSON-LD manifest with per-file and whole package hashes would be with e.g. W3C ld-signatures/ld-proofs and W3C DID (Decentralized Identifiers) or x.509 certs in a CT log.
JupyterLite – WASM-powered Jupyter running in the browser
Despite Pyolite has a miserable performance (20MB of downloads), the overall project direction is correct.
I said this already 10 years ago: We don't need more cloud computing but need to empower users end devices again. Jupyter is typically operated on powerful notebooks and not on mobile devices.
Isn't that not just Java all over again, but this time with JavaScript?
There are crucial differences between Java applets and JS.
- Applets tried to render their own GUI, Wasm doesn't and defers to the browser.
- applets needed a big, slow to start and resource hungry VM. Wasm is running in the same thread your JS is also running in, it's light, and loads faster than JS
- Java and flash were plugins, which needed to be installed and kept up to date separately. Wasm is baked into your browser's JS engine
- Wasm code is very fast and can achieve near native execution speeds. It can make use of advanced optimisations. SIMD has shipped in Chrome, and will soon in Firefox
- The wasm spec is very, very good, and really quite small. This means that implementing it is comparatively cheap, and this should make it easy to see it implemented by different vendors.
- Java was just Java. Wasm can serve as a platform for any language. See my earlier point about the spec
So it's apples and oranges. The need to have something besides JS hasn't gone away, so their use cases might be similar. The two technologies couldn't be more distinct, though.
You must view the browser with JS and WASM as a unit.
The browser renders it's own GUI too, it's not OS native
The browser uses lots of resources too.
The browser is kind of a plugin to the OS and must be updated separately.
Java nowadays is pretty fast too.
Java VM serves a platform for multiple languages like Scala, Kotlin, Clojure.
Let's face it, the browser is the new JVM and a soon it gets the same permissions like the JVM to access the file system and such, we get the same problems.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052393 re: Starboard:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres... : "Subresource Integrity (SRI) is a security feature that enables browsers to verify that resources they fetch (for example, from a CDN) are delivered without unexpected manipulation. It works by allowing you to provide a cryptographic hash that a fetched resource must match."
> There's a new Native Filesystem API: "The new Native File System API allows web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user's device." https://web.dev/native-file-system/
> We'll need a way to grant specific URLs specific, limited amounts of storage.
[...]
> https://github.com/deathbeds/jyve/issues/46 :
> Would [Micromamba] and conda-forge build a WASM architecture target?
Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks Launch the GSF
> With data centers around the world accounting for 1% of global electricity demand, and projections to consume 3-8% in the next decade, it’s imperative we address this as an industry.
> To help in that endeavor, we’re excited to announce the formation of The Green Software Foundation – a nonprofit founded by Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks established with the Linux Foundation and the Joint Development Foundation Projects LLC to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and leading practices for building green software. The Green Software Foundation was born out of a mutual desire and need to collaborate across the software industry. Organizations with a shared commitment to sustainability and an interest in green software development principles are encouraged to join the foundation to help grow the field of green software engineering, contribute to standards for the industry, and work together to reduce the carbon emissions of software. The foundation aims to help the software industry contribute to the information and communications technology sector’s broader targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement.
Here's to now hand-optimized efficient EC, SHA-256, SHA-3, and Scrypt routines due to incentives. See also The Crypto Climate Accord, which is also inspired by the Paris Agreement: https://cryptoclimate.org/
... "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854
Is 100% offset by PPAs always 200% Green?
From "Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20015801 :
> [ ] We should create some sort of a badge and structured data (JSONLD, RDFa, Microdata) for site headers and/or footers that lets consumers know that we're working toward '200% green' so that we can vote with our money.
>inspired by the Paris Agreement
So we’re just going to let China do the polluting? Maybe you didn’t know but the Paris Agreement exempted China from all standards.
No, under the Paris Agreement, countries set voluntary targets for themselves and regularly reassess.
And when China says it’s doing nothing everybody cheered.
TBF, the glut of [Chinese,] solar panels has significantly helped lower the cost of renewables; which is in everyone's interest.
They’re cheap because the secret ingredient is slavery and Uighur blood.
Rocky Linux releases its first release candidate
One of our clients pushed us toward AlmaLinux instead of CentOS 7. At the time, we vaguely suggested Rocky Linux, but noted we were kind of still waiting for the future (hence our suggestion of going with CentOS 7 and migrating later to the "true successor" of CentOS).
What is the HN community's perception of this? Is AlmaLinux a good choice? Do you believe Rocky Linux will succeed?
I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over. My guess is that supporting all the companies who do not want to pay Redhat, for free, is going to push developers way pretty quickly.
Even if I’m wrong I’d still want to see at least two or three solid release before using either in production.
Just use Redhat or switch to Ubuntu. Then you can re-evaluate in five tears time.
> I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over.
While it's possible that CentOS would have failed (I'm not sure slow initial releases actually indicate that), it also wasn't the only popular clone of RHEL in popular use. Scientific Linux (developed by FermiLab) was also popular and in fairly wide use. I doubt Red Hat would have made the change to CentOS that spurred all this if Scientific Linux hadn't decided not to continue and just use CentOS instead in 2019, because instead of a "crap, we have to start a new distro to provide what CentOS did" movement there would have been a much quicker and easier mass exodus to Scientific Linux.
The Scientific Linux team decided to not make a Scientific Linux 8, and instead switch over to CentOS 8[0]. Note this was announced prior to the announcement about CentOS 8 going away.
CERN et al are still deciding what to do[1].
[0]: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX...
[1]: https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy
USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops
What are the costs to add a USB PD module to an electronic device? https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/easy-usb‑c-power-for-all-you...
- [ ] Create an industry standard interface for charging and using [power tool,] battery packs; and adapters
Half-Double: New hammering technique for DRAM Rowhammer bug
From "Rowhammer for qubits: is it possible?" https://amp.reddit.com/r/quantum/comments/7osud4/rowhammer_f... :
> Sometimes bits just flip due to "cosmic rays"; or, logically, also due to e.g. neutron beams and magnetic fields.
> With rowhammer, there are read/write (?) access patterns which cause predictable-enough information "leakage" to be useful for data exfiltration and privilege escalation.
> With the objective of modeling qubit interactions using quantum-mechanical properties of fields of electrons in e.g. DRAM, Is there a way to use DRAM electron "soft errors" to model quantum interactions; to build a quantum computer from what we currently see as errors in DRAM?
> If not with current DRAM, could one apply a magnetic field to DRAM in order to exploit quantum properties of electrons moving in a magnetic field?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosstalk
> [...] are there DRAM read/write patterns which cause errors due to interference which approximate quantum logic gates? Probably not, but maybe; especially with an applied magnetic field (which then isn't the DRAM sitting on our desks, it's then DRAM + a constant or variable field).
> I suppose to test this longshot theory, one would need to fuzz low-level RAM loads and search for outputs that look like quantum gate outputs. Or, monitor normal workloads which result in RAM faults which approximate quantum logic gate outputs and train a network to recognize the features.
> I am reminded of a recent approach to in-RAM computing that's not memristors.
> Soft errors caused by cosmic rays are obviously more frequent at higher altitudes (and outside of the Van Allen radiation belt).
Thought I'd ask this here as well.
Quantum tunneling was the perceived barrier at like DDR5 and higher densities FWIU? Barring new non-electron-based tech, how can we prevent adjacent electrons from just flipping at that gate grid gap size?
Other Quantum-on-Silicon approaches have coherence issues, too
Setting up a Raspberry Pi with 2 Network Interfaces as a simple router
Old but relevant, I have used an espressobin as a router for years and the performance I am getting is similar to much more expensive semi-professional routers. https://blog.tjll.net/building-my-perfect-router/
For those who wish to undergo lesser trouble to get similar performance/security there are number of Single Board Computers(SBCs) with OpenWrt support[1] sometimes with official support like those from Friendly Elec.
[1]https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_single-board-computers
[2]https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category...
I'm constantly looking for good priced SBC with cellular connectivity - that chart shows only 2/3 with modems and all appear to be via external modules.
Anyone know of any?
> This page shows devices which have a LTE modem built in and are supported by OpenWrt.
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_lte_modem_supported
It looks like this table is neither current nor complete though. And there's a different table of OpenWRT compatible devices that have a battery as well.
> [The Amarok (GL-X1200) Industrial IoT Gateway has] 2x SIM card slots for 2x 4G LTE modems (probably miniPCI-E so maybe upgradeable to 5G later), external antenna connectors for the LTE modems, MicroSD, #OpenWRT: https://store.gl-inet.com/collections/4g-smart-router/produc...
The Turris Omnia also has 4G LTE SIM card support (and LXC in their OpenWRT build). https://openwrt.org/toh/turris/turris_omnia
There's also a [Dockerized] x86 build of OpenWRT that probably also supports Mini PCI-E modules for 4G LTE, LoRa, and 5G. Route metrics determine which [gateway] route is tried first.
From "How much total throughput can your wi-fi router really provide?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26596395 :
> In 2021, most routers - even with OpenWRT and hardware-offloading - cannot actually push 1 Gigabit over wired Ethernet, though the port spec does say 1000 Mbps
What to do about GPU packages on PyPI?
“ Our current CDN “costs” are ~$1.5M/month and not getting smaller. This is generously supported by our CDN provider but is a liability for PyPI’s long-term existence.”
Wow
Bear in mind this isn't just end-users installing on their machines, it also includes continuous integration scripts that run quite frequently.
[Huge GPU] packages can be cached locally: persist ~/.cache/pip between builds with e.g. Docker, run a PyPI caching proxy,
"[Discussions on Python.org] [Packaging] Draft PEP: PyPI cost solutions: CI, mirrors, containers, and caching to scale" https://discuss.python.org/t/draft-pep-pypi-cost-solutions-c...
> Continuous Integration automated build and testing services can help reduce the costs of hosting PyPI by running local mirrors and advising clients in regards to how to efficiently re-build software hundreds or thousands of times a month without re-downloading everything from PyPI every time.
[...]
> Request from and advisory for CI Services and CI Implementors:
> Dear CI Service,
> - Please consider running local package mirrors and enabling use of local package mirrors by default for clients’ CI builds.
> - Please advise clients regarding more efficient containerized software build and test strategies.
> Running local package mirrors will save PyPI (the Python Package Index, a service maintained by PyPA, a group within the non-profit Python Software Foundation) generously donated resources. (At present (March 2020), PyPI costs ~ $800,000 USD a month to operate; even with generously donated resources).
Looks like the current figure is significantly higher than $800K/mo for science.
How to persist ~/.cache/pip between builds with e.g. Docker in order to minimize unnecessary GPU package re-downloads:
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.cache/pip
RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/home/appuser/.cache/pipWow, that RUN trick is exactly what I've been looking for! I've spent hours and hours in Docker documentation and hadn't seen that functionality.
Looks like it might be buildkit-specific?
Markdown Notes VS Code extension: Navigate notes with [[wiki-links]]
> Syntax highlighting for #tags.
What's the best way to search for #tags with VS Code? Are #tags indexed into an e.g. ctags file within a project or a directory?
> @bibtex-citations: Use pandoc-style citations in your notes (eg @author_title_year) to get syntax highlighting, autocompletion and go to definition, if you setup a global BibTeX file with your references.
Open VS Code search across files (Press Ctrl+Shift+F on windows) and type the tag that you are searching for: #tag
Simple as that https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/codebasics#_search...
Ask HN: Choosing a language to learn for the heck of it
I'm a technical manager, which means I do a lot of administrative stuff and a little coding. The coding has become a nice distraction when I need to take a break.
For "real work" I write mostly Python, a lot of SQL, a little bit of Go, and some shell scripting to glue it together. I'd like to learn something I have no need of for work. If it becomes useful later, that is OK, but not a goal. The goal is in creating something just for fun. That something is undefined, so general purpose languages are the population.
I have become curious lately in Nim, Crystal, and Zig. Small, modern, high performance languages. Curiousity comes from the cases when they are mentioned here, sometime for similar reasons I list above.
Nim is on top of the list: Sort of Python like, supported on Windows (I use Win/Mac/Linux), appears to have libraries for the things I do: Process text for insights, play projects would use interesting data instead of business data.
Crystal does not support Windows (yet), but appears to closer to Ruby. Its performance may be a bit better.
Zig came on my radar recently, I know less about it, compared to the little I know of the others.
Suggestions on choosing one as a hobby language?
> Suggestions on choosing one as a hobby language?
IDK how much of a hobby it'd remain, but: Rust compiles to WASM, C++ now has auto and coroutines (and real live memory management)
"Ask HN: Is it worth it to learn C in 2020?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878664
Show HN: Django SQL Dashboard
This looks great! In a similar vein - does anyone know of a project that will allow for a Django shell in the browser?
I know Jupyter exists - but a solution like this with the permissions would be valuable.
This launches the web-based Werkzeug debugger on Exception:
pip install django-extensions
python manage.py runserver_plus
This should run IPython Notebook with database models already imported :
python manage.py shell_plus --notebook
Interactive IPA Chart
Is there a [Linked Data] resource with the information in this interactive IPA chart (which is from Wikipedia FWICS) in addition to?:
- phoneme, ns:"US English letter combinations", []
- phoneme, ns:"schema.org/CreativeWorks which feature said phoneme", []
AFAIU, WordNet RDF doesn't have links to any IPA RDFS/OWL vocabulary/ontology yet.
Google Dataset Search
Information on how to annotate datasets: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/dataset
> We can understand structured data in Web pages about datasets, using either schema.org Dataset markup, or equivalent structures represented in W3C's Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) format. We also are exploring experimental support for structured data based on W3C CSVW, and expect to evolve and adapt our approach as best practices for dataset description emerge. For more information about our approach to dataset discovery, see Making it easier to discover datasets.
For more info on those:
- W3C's Data Catalog Vocabulary: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-3/
- Schema.org dataset: https://schema.org/Dataset
- CSVW Namespace Vocabulary Terms: https://www.w3.org/ns/csvw
- Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web (examples on how to use CSVW): https://www.w3.org/TR/csv2rdf/
Use cases for such [LD: Linked Data] metadata:
1. #StructuredPremises:
> (How do I indicate that this is a https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle predicated upon premises including this Dataset and these logical propositions?)
2. #LinkedMetaAnalyses; #LinkedResearch "#StudyGraph"
3. [CSVW (Tabular Data Model),] schema.org/Dataset(s) with per column (per-feature) physical quantity and unit URIs with e.g. QUDT and/or https://schema.org/StructuredValue metadata for maximum data reusability.
4. JupyterLab notebooks:
4a. JupyterLab Metadata Service extension: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-metadata-service :
> - displays linked data about the resources you are interacting with in JuyterLab.
> - enables other extensions to register as linked data providers to expose JSON LD about an entity given the entity's URL.
> - exposes linked data to the user as a Linked Data viewer in the Data Browser pane.
4b. JupyterLab Data Explorer: https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-data-explorer :
> - Data changing on you? Use RxJS observables to represent data over time.
> - Have a new way to look at your data? Create React or lumino components to view a certain type.
> - Built-in data explorer UI to find and use available datasets.
Ask HN: Cap Table Service Recommendations
Recent founders, do you have any recommendations for services for managing a cap table? Or do you do it yourself? Any suggestions for how to choose?
Here are the "409a valuation" reviews on FounderKit: https://founderkit.com/legal/409a-valuation/reviews
Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster
The innovation here is getting sql.js to use http and range requests for file access rather than all being in memory.
I wonder when people using next.js will start using this for faster builds for larger static sites?
See also https://github.com/bittorrent/sqltorrent, same trick but using BitTorrent
Yeah, that was one of the inspirations for this. That one does not work in the browser though, would be a good project to do that same thing but with sqlite in wasm and integrated with WebTorrent instead of a native torrent program.
I actually did also implement a similar thing fetching data on demand from WebTorrent (and in turn helping to host the data yourself by being on the website): https://phiresky.github.io/tv-show-ratings/ That uses a protobufs split into a hashmap instead of SQLite though.
This looks pretty efficient. Some chains can be interacted with without e.g. web3.js? LevelDB indexes aren't SQLite.
Datasette is one application for views of read-only SQLite dbs with out-of-band replication. https://github.com/simonw/datasette
There are a bunch of *-to-sqlite utilities in corresponding dogsheep project.
Arrow JS for 'paged' browser client access to DuckDB might be possible and faster but without full SQLite SQL compatibility and the SQLite test suite. https://arrow.apache.org/docs/js/
> Direct Parquet & CSV querying
In-browser notebooks like Pyodide and Jyve have local filesystem access with the new "Filesystem Access API", but downloading/copying all data to the browser for every run of a browser-hosted notebook may not be necessary. https://web.dev/file-system-access/
DuckDB can directly & selectively query Parquet files over HTTP/S3 as well. See here for examples: https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/6c7c9805fdf1604039ebed...
Wasm3 compiles itself (using LLVM/Clang compiled to WASM)
Self-hosting (compilers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting_(compilers) :
> In computer programming, self-hosting is the use of a program as part of the toolchain or operating system that produces new versions of that same program—for example, a compiler that can compile its own source code
How big of a milestone is self-hosting for a language?
Semgrep: Semantic grep for code
Is there a more complete example of how to call semgrep from pre-commit (which gets called before every git commit) in order to prevent e.g. Python print calls (print(), print \\n(), etc.) from being checked in?
https://semgrep.dev/docs/extensions/ describes how to do pre-commit.
Nvm, here's semgrep's own .pre-commit-config.yml for semgrep itself: https://github.com/returntocorp/semgrep/blob/develop/.pre-co...
I've never used the `pre-commit` framework, but it's really simple to wire up arbitrary shell scripts; check out the
`.git/hooks` directory in your repo for samples, e.g. `.git/hooks/pre-commit.sample`.
You can run any old shell script there, without having to install a python tool.
Yeah but that githook will only be installed on that one repo on that one machine. And they may have no or a different version of bash installed (on e.g. MacOS or Windows). IMHO, POSIX-compatible portable shell scripts are more trouble than portable Python scripts.
Pre-commit requires Python and pre-commit to be installed (and then it downloads every hook function).
This fetches the latest version of every hook defined in the .pre-commit-config.yml:
pre-commit autoupdate
A person could easily `ln -s repo/.hooks/hook*.sh repo/.git/hooks/` after every git clone.
Out of curiosity, Is there value in doing this over (say) running a GitHub Action post commit and failing the build if it finds something nasty?
If you can catch it before the commit is even made then why do/wait for a build?
Fair enough. Guess IDE plugins work even better for that
IDE plugins are not at all consistent from one IDE to another. Pre-commit is great for teams with different IDEs because all everyone needs to do is:
[pip,] install pre-commit
pre-commit install
# git commit
# pre-commit run --all-files
# pre-commit autoupdate
Ask HN: What to use instead of Bash / Sh for scripting?
I'm at the point where I feel a certain fatigue writing Bash scripts, but I am just not sure of what the alternative is for medium sized (say, ~150-500 LOC) scripts.
The common refrain of "use Python" hasn't really worked fantastically: I don't know what version of Python I'm going to have on the system, installing dependencies is not fun, shelling out when needed is not pleasant, and the size of program always seemingly doubles.
I'm willing to accept something that's not on the system as long as it's one smallish binary that's available in multiple architectures. Right now, I've settled on (ab)using jq, using it whenever tasks get too complex, but I'm wondering if anyone else has found a better way that should also hopefully not be completely a black box to my colleagues?
A configuration management system may have you write e.g. YAML with Jinja2 so that you don't reinvent the idempotent wheel.
It's really easy to write dangerous shell scripts ("${@}" vs ${@} for example) and also easy to write dangerous Python scripts (cmd="{}; {}").
Sarge is one way to use subprocess in Python. https://sarge.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
If you're doing installation and configuration, the most team-maintainable thing is to avoid custom code and work with a configuration management system test runner.
When you "A shell script will be fine, all I have to do is [...]" and then you realize that you need a portable POSIX shell script and to be merged it must have actual automated tests of things that are supposed to run as root - now in a fresh vm/container for testing - and manual verification of `set +xev` output isn't an automated assertion.
> avoid custom code and work with a configuration management system test runner
ansible-molecule is a test runner for Ansible playbooks that can create VMs or containers on local or remote resources.
You can definitely just call shell scripts from Ansible, but the (parallel) script output is only logged after the script returns a return code unless you pipe the script output somewhere and tail that .
> manual verification of `set +xev` output isn't an automated assertion.
From "Bash Error Handling" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24745833 : you can display the line number in `set -x` output by setting $PS4:
export PS4='+(${BASH_SOURCE}:${LINENO}) '
set -x
Estonian Electronic Identity Card and Its Security Challenges [pdf]
Proud e-resident here :)
US citizen here trying to champion such a system in the US. Would you be willing to share pros and cons from your experience using the system day to day?
Are you working with a specific org or initiative? I'm also an American interested in this (and an e-resident who formerly worked for the Estonian government).
Mostly activist citizen efforts from the outside, as legislation is going to be required to appropriate funding and direction from Congress, and the legislators I interface with are busy with arguably more pressing work (unfortunate but entirely understandable, such are the times).
I intend to apply at the USDS for the Login.gov team in some capacity to help on the tech side if the necessary legislation can be put in place to support such an initiative. Their system already supports the DOD CAC (common access card), which is a short walk away from a citizen digital ID card (would be a different org and PKI root to administer and govern citizen cards, to grossly simplify).
Login.gov recently expanded to support city and local gov IAM needs (when they have ties to federal programs) [1] [2], so there is roadmap momentum and executive branch will. "Digital identity is a big deal. [3]" They're already serving 30 million users, and 500k DAUs, really just a matter of scaling up.
[1] https://www.gsa.gov/blog/2021/02/18/logingov-to-provide-auth...
[2] https://www.govloop.com/login-gov-expands-use-to-cities-stat...
I get the spirit and a m familiar with the CAC and general benefits, and using that for all .gov stuff is attractive (taxes, bills, FASFA, etc)
I think you’re glossing over two major implementation factors that need to be part of the discussion from get-go:
* how much CAC use is dependent on fairly specific govt tech infra to be widely deployed, and how will that work for everyone (ever tried to setup a CAC on a civ computer)
* key control, either extremely decentralized like the iPhone (lock yourself out of your passport?), or extremely centralized and the newest honeypot OPM holds (root cert for all e-citizen PKI). US currently doesn’t have the internal cybersec chops to run that at all (closest equivalent is CISA).
You're right to point this out, but my counter argument is that these are solvable pain points for such an implementation (either done today in competent zero trust security architectures in progressive orgs or at nation state levels such as Estonia). You won't need a CAC reader on computers, for the most part, if you have mobile apps that can perform the identity proofing (such that's already done with examples like Apple's biometrics systems, FIDO2/WebAuthn, Apply Pay, etc). You'd still have the card for interfacing at endpoints (banks, postal service, IRS/SSA offices, other trust anchors and government services endpoints). I already login to my US CBP Global Entry account with Login.gov and 2FA, why can I not today use the same IAM system to login to my Social Security account? Or my IRS tax account? Or to attest to my citizenship or other attributes that I'd normally need a certified document for (yuk!).
I'm not arguing for such a system without robust support and reasonable downgrades for failure scenarios (identity reproofing if you lose your digital ID, for example). I'm arguing for, admittedly challenging, digital ID modernization without disenfranchisement. I genuinely appreciate you pointing out the challenges, as they must be addressed.
US DHS CISA is absolutely a resource that needs to be leaned on heavily to implement what I describe, and to ensure a strong security posture throughout the federal government's infrastructure.
FWIU, DHS has funded [1] development of e.g W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers [2] and W3C Verifiable Credentials [3]:
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aw3.org+%22funded+by+t...
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/
[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/
Additional notes regarding credentials (certificates, badges, degrees, honorarial degrees, then-evaluated competencies) and capabilities models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19813340
westurner/blockchain-credential-resources.md: https://gist.github.com/westurner/4345987bb29fca700f52163c33...
Value storage and transmission networks have developed standards and implementations for identity, authentication, and authorization. ILP (Interledger Protocol) RFC 15 specifies "ILP addresses" for [crypto] ledger account IDs: https://interledger.org/rfcs/0015-ilp-addresses/
From "Verifiable Credentials Use Cases" https://w3c.github.io/vc-use-cases/ :
> A verifiable claim is a qualification, achievement, quality, or piece of information about an entity's background such as a name, government ID, payment provider, home address, or university degree. Such a claim describes a quality or qualities, property or properties of an entity which establish its existence and uniqueness. The use cases outlined here are provided in order to make progress toward possible future standardization and interoperability of both low- and high-stakes claims with the goals of storing, transmitting, and receiving digitally verifiable proof of attributes such as qualifications and achievements. The use cases in this document focus on concrete scenarios that the technology defined by the group should address.
FWIU, the US Department of Education is studying or already working with https://blockcerts.org/ for educational credentials.
Here are the open sources of blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer and blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js: https://github.com/blockchain-certificates
Might a natural-born resident get a government ID card for passing a recycling and environmental sustainability quiz.
Systemd makes life miserable, again, this time by breaking DNS
So, I made the mistake of updating my laptop from Fedora 31 to Fedora 33 last night. Normally this is fairly painless, as my laptop is one of the last machines I perform distribution upgrades. Today while doing some pole survey work out in the field, I tethered my laptop to my phone as has been done hundreds of times before. To my surprise, DNS doesn't work anymore, but only in web browsers. Both Firefox and Chrome can't resolve names anymore. Command line tools like ping and host work normally. WTF?
Why are distributions continuing to allow systemd to extend its tentacles deeper and deeper into more parts of Linux userland with poorly tested subsystem replacements for parts of Linux that have been stable for decades? Does nobody else consider this repeating pattern of rewrite-replace-introduce-new-bugs a problem? Newer is not all that better if you break what is a pretty bog standard and common use-case.
As well, Firefox now defaults to DoH (DNS over HTTPS), which may be bypassing systemd-resolved by doing DNS resolution in the app instead of calling `gethostbyname()` (`man gethostbyname`) and/or `getaddrinfo()`.
`man systemd-resolved` describes why there is new DNS functionality: security; "caching and validating DNS/DNSSEC stub resolver, as well as an LLMR and MulticastDNS resolver and responder".
From `man systemd-resolved` https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/systemd-resolved.servi... :
> To improve compatibility, /etc/resolv.conf is read in order to discover configured system DNS servers, but only if it is not a symlink to /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf, /usr/lib/systemd/resolv.conf or /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf
> [...] Note that the selected mode of operation for this file is detected fully automatically, depending on whether /etc/resolv.conf is a symlink to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf or lists 127.0.0.53 as DNS server.
Is /etc/resolv.conf read on reload and or restart of the systemd-resolved service (`servicectl restart systemd-named`)?
Some examples of validating DNSSEC in `man delv` would be helpful.
NetworkManager (now with systemd-resolved) is one system for doing DNS configuration for zero or more transient interfaces:
man nmcli
nmcli connection help
nmcli c help
nmcli c h
nmcli c show ssid_or_nm_profile | grep -i dns
nmcli c modify help
man systemd-resolved
man delv
man dnssec-trust-anchors.dit's probably dnssec & your time is probably off.
jorunalctl -xe should be showing errors if so. probably check 'joirnalctl -xeu systemd-resolved'
use 'date' to check the time. if it's off, I use ntpdate to update my clock. but since dns isn't resolving I use 'dig pool.ntp.org @9.9.9.9' to resolve a ntp pool server ip address. then ntpdate [that up].
one of those things that hits me a bunch that I haven't automated quite yet. supposedly newer systemd can detect dnssec being bad in some cases & disable it, after a time, after a bunch of failures, but it either hasn't tripped in a number of cases for me or something else was odd in my envs. manually syncing the clock via ntp usually gets my dns working again.
> manually syncing the clock via ntp usually gets my dns working again.
Why is this necessary?
normally systemd-timedated does a good job keeping things in sync!
but some of my systems seem to have not great real-time clock batteries, and the system will forget the time. i think there might be some other circumstance that sometimes causes my system clock to be way out of whack, but i'm not sure what.
so that's why my clock doesn't work and needs sync.
the dnssec internet protocols are designed to guarantee the user that they have up to date, accurate, trustable records. this depends on your system knowing what time it is now. if your system is way ahead or way behind the actual time, the dnssec records it gets dont appear as valid. And systemd-resolved will reject them, if it is set up to respect DNSSEC.
Systemd-timedated: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-tim...
timedatectl set-ntp false && \
timedatectl set-ntp true
Ask HN: How bad is proof-of-work blockchain energy consumption?
I'm not a blockchain/crypto expert by any means, but I've been hearing about how much energy the proof-of-work blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs) consume. Unless I'm mistaken their whole design relies on cranking through more and more CPU cycles. Should we be more concerned about this? Are the concerns overblown? Are there ways to improve it without certain crypto currencies imploding?
A rational market would be choosing an asset that offers value storage and transmission (between points in spacetime) according to criteria: "security" (security theater, infosec, cryptologic competency assessment, software assurances), "future stability" (future switching costs), and "cost".
The externalities of energy production are what must be overcome if we are to be able to withstand wasteful overconsumption of electricity. Eventually, we could all have free clean energy and no lightsabers, right?
So, we do need to minimize wasteful overconsumption. Define wasteful in terms of USD/kWHr (irregardless of industry)? In terms of behavioral economics, why are they behaving that way when there are alternatives that cost <$0.01/tx and a fairly-aggregated comprehensive n kWhr of electricity?
TIL about these guys, who are deciding to somewhat-responsibly self-regulate in the interest of long-term environmental sustainability for all of the land: "Crypto Climate Accord". https://cryptoclimate.org/
"Crypto Climate Accord Launches to Decarbonize Cryptocurrency Industry Brings together the likes of CoinShares, ConsenSys, Ripple, and the UNFCCC Climate Champions to lead sustainability in blockchain and crypto" (2021) https://bit.ly/CryptoClimateAccord
> What are the objectives of the Crypto Climate Accord? The Accord’s overall objective is to decarbonize the global crypto industry. There are three provisional objectives to be finalized in partnership with Accord supporters:
> - Enable all of the world’s blockchains to be powered by 100% renewables by the 2025 UNFCCC COP Conference
> - Develop an open-source accounting standard for measuring emissions from the cryptocurrency industry
> - Achieve net-zero emissions for the entire crypto industry, including all business operations beyond blockchains and retroactive emissions, by 2040
Similar to the Paris Agreement (2015), stakeholders appear to be setting their own targets for sustainability in accordance with the Crypto Climate Accord (2021). https://cryptoclimate.org/accord/
Someone who's not in renewables could launch e.g. a "Satoshi Nakamoto Clean Energy Fund: SNCEF" to receive donations from e.g. hash pools and connect nonprofits with sustainability managed renewables. How many SNCEFs did you give this year and why?
#CleanEnergy
Thankfully, cheap energy fit for Bitcoin mining is increasingly not found in fossil fuels, but in renewables, wasted and “stranded” sources of energy, as we’ll dive into next. [1]
[1]: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-will-save-our-e...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...
[3]: For example, to illustrate the point, I currently mine BTG on a spare GPU I had because my house needed to be heated anyways. I turn the miner on when I want heat in my house (about 600w) and turn it off when not needed... This is a micro example of what could be done across our entire society "Recent data suggest that space heating accounts for about 42 percent of energy use in U.S. residences and about 36 percent of energy use in U.S. commercial buildings."[4] . Every one of those space heaters could actually be a processor doing computation. In the future the "waster" will not be a miner but someone who turns electricity straight to heat without intermediate chains of value (such as computation or light).
[4]:https://www.epa.gov/rhc/renewable-space-heating#:~:text=Rece....
It's important to note for #3 that a mining GPU is a terribly inefficient space heater.
No, all space heaters are equally efficient. They all have perfect 100% efficiency, because they turn electrical power into heat. When your work product is heat and the waste product is also heat, then there really is no waste.
Technically in the case of cryptocurrency mining, some of the electrical power is turned into information rather than heat. In principle this reduces the amount of heat that you get, but in practice this isn’t even measurable. Most of the information is erased (discarded as useless), which turns it back into heat. Only a few hundred bits of information will be kept after successfully mining a block of transactions, and the amount of heat that costs you is fantastically small. Far smaller than you can measure.
More transistors per unit area, but also more efficient please! There should be demand for more efficient chips (semiconductors,) that are fully-utilized while depreciating on your ma's electricity bill (which is not yet (?) really determined by a market-based economy with intraday speculation to smooth over differences in supply and demand in the US). Oversupply of the electrical grid results in damage costs; which is why the price sometimes falls so low where there are intraday prices and supply has been over-subsidized pending the additional load from developing economies and EVs: Electric Vehicles.
New grid renewables (#CleanEnergy) are now less expensive than existing baseload; which makes renewables long term environment-rational and short term price-rational.
"Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854
> No, all space heaters are equally efficient. They all have perfect 100% efficiency, because they turn electrical power into heat. When your work product is heat and the waste product is also heat, then there really is no waste.
This heat must be distributed throughout the room somehow (i.e. a batteryless woodstove fan or a sterling engine that does work with the difference in entropy when there is a difference in entropy)
> Technically in the case of cryptocurrency mining, some of the electrical power is turned into information rather than heat. In principle this reduces the amount of heat that you get, but in practice this isn’t even measurable. Most of the information is erased (discarded as useless), which turns it back into heat.
See "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" re: a possible way to delete known observer-entangled bits while reducing heat/entropy (thus bypassing Landauer's limit for classical computation?)?
> Only a few hundred bits of information will be kept after successfully mining a block of transactions, and the amount of heat that costs you is fantastically small. Far smaller than you can measure.
Each n-symbol sequence in the hash function output does appear to have nearly equal frequency/probability of occurrence. Indeed, is Proof-of-Work worth the heat if you're not reusing the waste heat?
What does a PGP signature on a Git commit prove?
Totally though this was going to be some snarky article claiming they're worthless. Refreshing to see the article just ernestly answers the headline.
> To my knowledge, there are no effective attacks against sha1 as used by git
Perhaps im missing something, but wouldn't a chosen prefix collision be relavent here? I imagine the real reason is that cost to pull it off for sha1 is somewhere in the $10,000-$100,000 range (but getting cheaper every year) which is lots of $$$ to attack something without an obvious attack scenario that can justify it.
So the big problem with Git and SHA1 is that in many cases you are giving full control to an untrusted third party over the sha1 hash of something. For example, if you merge a binary file, it'd be quite easy for them to generate two different versions of the same file, with the same SHA1 digest, and then use the second version to cause problems in the future. You may also be able to modify a text file in the same way without getting noticed in review (I'm not up to speed on how advanced sha1 collision techniques are now).
Similarly, the git commits you merge themselves could have that done - the actual git commit serialization gives you a fair bit of ability to append stuff to it that isn't shown in the UI. That wouldn't affect the signed git commits. But it's still dubious to have the ability to change old history in a checkout.
Anyway, Git is apparently moving towards SHA256 support, so hopefully this problem will be fixed soon: https://lwn.net/Articles/823352/
> it'd be quite easy for them to generate two different versions of the same file
Citation needed. When SHA1 was cracked, it cost $110k worth of cloud computing. And there was some restriction on the two files which matched checksums. IIRC it was like the Birthday Paradox — you don’t pick one and find another sharing the same match, but you generate billions of mutations of similar binaries and statistically two would have the same checksum.
Not exactly easy, fast, cheap, or work with all use cases.
That nonce value could be ±\0 or 5,621,964,321e100; though for well-designed cryptographic hash functions it's far less likely that - at maximum difficulty - a low nonce value will result in a hash collision.
? How are nonces even involved in this?
Searching for the value to prepend or append that causes a hash collision is exactly the same as finding a nonce value at maximum difficulty (not less than the difficulty value, exactly equal to the target hash).
Mutate and check.
The term nonce has a broader meaning than how it is used in bitcoin. (Edit: i reworded this sentence from what i originally had)
That said, no, finding a collision and finding a preimage are very different things, and well the collision attacks on sha1 will involve a lot of guessing and checking, they are not generic birthday or bruteforce attacks but rely on weaknesses in sha-1 to be practical. They also do not make preimage attacks practical.
Brute forcing to find `hash(data_1+nonce) == hash(data_0)` differs very little from ``hash(data_1+nonce) < difficulty_level`. Write each and compare the cost/fitness/survival functions.
If the hash function is reversible - as may be discovered through e.g. mutation and selection - that would help find hashes that are equal and maybe also less than.
Practically, there are "rainbow tables" for very many combinations of primes and stacked transforms: it's not necessary to search the whole space for simple collisions and may not be necessary for preimages; we don't know and it's just a matter of time. "Collision attack" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack
Crytographic nonce > hashing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce#Hashing
> Brute forcing
The attack being discussed is not a brute force attack (or not purely). If the best attack on sha1 was bruteforce than we would still be using it.
> to find `hash(data_1+nonce) == hash(data_0)` differs very little from ``hash(data_1+nonce) < difficulty_level`.
Neither of those are collision attacks (assuming you dont control the data variable). The first is a second pre-image and the second (with equality) would be a normal preimage.
The attack for sha1 under discussion (chosen prefix collision) is finding hash(a+b) == hash(c+d) where you control b and d (but not neccesarily a and c)
> Practically, there are "rainbow tables" for very many combinations of primes and stacked transforms:
What do primes or rainbow tables have to do with any of this? Primes especially. Rainbow tables are at least related to reversing hashes, if totally irrelavent to the subject at hand, but how did you get to primes?
Practically, iff browsers still relied upon SHA-1 to fingerprint and pin and verify certificates instead of the actual chain, and there were no file size limits on x.509 certificates, some fields in a cert (e.g. CommonName and SAN) would be chosen and other fields would then potentially be nonce.
In context to finding a valid cert with a known good hash fingerprint, how many prime keypairs could there be to precompute and cache/memoize when brute forcing.
"SHA-1 > Cryptanalysis and validation " does list chosen prefix collision as one of many weaknesses now identified in SHA-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1#Cryptanalysis_and_valida...
This from 2008 re: the 200 PS3s it took to generate a rogue CA cert with a considered-valid MD5 hash: https://hackaday.com/2008/12/30/25c3-hackers-completely-brea...
... Was just discussing e.g. frankencerts the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26605647
Breakthrough for ‘massless’ energy storage
"Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions"
It's 10 times more everything, just like every other battery breakthrough in the last several decades. AND, you get to use it as a building material?
- Sounds too good to be true: Check
- Sounds like every other "big" breakthrough: Check
- Article light on science and heavy on assertions: Check
- Skepticism engaged: Check
It may really be 10x, but you've mischaracterized what the paper is claiming a 10x breakthrough for. In fairness, the linked article is light on the specifics.
The claim is:
__This battery holds 10x more charge per kilo of material than previous attempts at STRUCTURAL (massless) battery materials__.
To be specific, this material holds only _ONE FIFTH_ the charge of what your smartphone's battery can hold per kilo of battery. No laws of thermodynamics is being broken and this is not at all about battery chemistry. It's all about the 'physics' of construction materials: About how this stuff is made in the factory and layered. The basic battery chemistry going on is not much different from what's been available for years - the interesting part is how this material encases it.
You can't make a car by building the chassis out of smartphone batteries. But the promise of this paper is that you CAN build the car chassis out of this battery, and even if this battery is only 20% as effective, a car chassis is rather large, and you needed it anyway, so every drop of power you can store in the chassis itself was effectively 'free' - hence the somewhat hyperbolous 'massless' terminology.
> You can't make a car by building the chassis out of smartphone batteries
They're called Structural batteries (or [micro]structural super/ultracapacitors)
"Carmakers want to ditch battery packs, use auto bodies for energy storage" (2020,) https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/11/carmakers-want-to-ditch...
This is literally what TFA is about
OpenSSL Security Advisory
If the cloud companies just paid a team of five people 200K each to spend a year rewriting OpenSSL from scratch, they would save multiple millions in scrambling to deploy bug fixes.
Nope, they'd just create new software with different bugs that have not been discovered yet. Then we'd all be scrambling to fix those bugs.
Not if the implementation is formally verified, like miTLS [0] and EverCrypt [1]. Parts of the latter were integrated into Firefox, which even provided a performance boost (10x in one case) [2].
I think what is needed is something like EverCrypt but for TLS. Or in other words, something like miTLS but which extracts to C and/or Assembly, to avoid garbage collection and for easy interoperation with different programming languages (preferably including an OpenSSL-compatible API for backwards compatibility).
[0]: https://mitls.org/ [1]: https://hacl-star.github.io/HaclValeEverCrypt.html [2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/07/06/performance-imp...
Formally verified against what? and what assumption were made?
miTLS is formally verified against the TLS spec on handshaking, assuming the lower-level crypto routine are good. It is not even free from timing attack.
EverCrypt have stronger proof, but it is only safe as in not crashing and correct as in match the spec in all valid input. It is not proved to be free from DoS or invalid input attack.
OpenSSL do more then TLS. Lots of interesting thing are in the cert format parsing and management.
> Formally verified against what? and what assumption were made?
Well, tell me again, what is OpenSSL formally verified against? What assumptions were made in OpenSSL?
Formal verification does not eliminate very large classes of bugs only when absolutely everything is formally verified, including timing attacks. Instead, it consistently produces more reliable software, many times even when only certain basic properties are proved (such as, memory safety, lack of integer overflows or division by zero, etc).
Formal verification can be a continuum, like testing, but proven to work for all inputs (that possibly meet certain conditions, under certain assumptions). The assumptions and properties that are proven can always be strengthened later, as seen in multiple real-world projects (such as seL4 and others).
The result is code that is almost always a lot more bug-free than code that is not formally verified. And as I said, more properties can be proven over time, especially as new classes of attacks are discovered (e.g. timing attacks, speculation attacks in CPUs, etc).
To formally verify an implementation you need a... formal description of what is to be implemented and verified.
Constructing a formal specification from RFC8446 is possible.
Constructing a formal specification for PKIX... is not. PKIX is specified by a large number of RFCs and ITU-T/ISO specs, some of which are more formal than others. E.g., constructing a formal specification for ASN.1 should be possible (though a lot of work), while constructing a formal specification for certificate validation is really hard, especially if you must support complex PKIs like DoD's. Checking CRLs and OCSP, among other things, requires support for HTTP, and even LDAP, so now you have... a bunch more RFCs to construct formal descriptions of.
And there had better be no bugs in the formal descriptions you construct from all these specs! Recall, they're mostly not formal specs at all -- they're written in English, with smatterings of ASN.1 (which is formal, though the specs for it, though they're very very good, mostly aren't formal).
The CVE in question is in the PKIX part of OpenSSL, not the TLS implementation.
What you're asking for is not 5 man-years worth of work, but tens of man-decades. The number of people with deep knowledge of all this stuff is minute as it is -- maybe just a handful, tens at most. The number of people with deep knowledge of a lot of this stuff is larger, but still minute. So you're asking to spend decades' worth of a tiny band of people's time on this project, when there are other valuable things for them to do.
The number of people who can do dev work in this space is much larger, of course -- in the thousands. But very few of them have the right expertise to work on a formal, verified implementation of PKIX.
Plus, it's all a moving target.
Sure, we could... train a lot of people just for such a project, but it takes time to do that, and it still takes time from that tiny band of people who know this stuff really well.
I'm afraid you're asking for unobtanium.
EDIT: Plus, there's probably tens of millions of current dollars' (if not more) worth of development embodied in OpenSSL as it stands. It's probably at least that much to replace it with a verified implementation, and probably much more because the value of programmers expert enough to do it is much more than the $200K/year suggested above (even if you train new ones, it would take years of training, and then they would be just as valuable). I think a proper , formally verified replacement of OpenSSL would probably run into the hundreds of millions, especially if it's one huge project since those tend to fail.
Well, sure, if your start with those premises, then I'm not surprised that you reach the conclusion that the goal is unachievable.
First of all, if constructing a formal specification for PKIX is not possible, then that should be telling you that it either needs to be simplified, better specified or scrapped altogether for something better (the latter would require an extremely large transition period, I'm imagining, so the first two are much preferred in this situation).
Otherwise, how can you be sure that any implementation in fact implements it correctly?
> And there had better be no bugs in the formal descriptions you construct from all these specs!
Well, I don't think that is true. You should in fact allow bugs in the formal description, otherwise how will you ever get anything done in such a project?
You see, having a formal description with a bug is much better than having no formal description at all.
If you have no formal description, you can't really tell if your code has bugs. If you have a buggy formal description, then you are able to catch some bugs in the implementation and the implementation can also catch some bugs in the formal description.
Also, some parts of the formal description can catch bugs in other parts of the formal description.
So the end result can be strictly better than the status quo.
> Plus, it's all a moving target.
Sure, but hopefully it's a moving target moving in the direction of simplification rather than getting more complex, otherwise things will just get worse rather than get better, regardless if we keep with the status quo or not. I'm not a TLS expert by any means but I think TLS 1.3 moved in that direction for some parts of the protocol, at least (if I'm not mistaken).
Also, I think you are not fully appreciating that formal verification can be done incrementally.
You can start by doing the minimum possible, i.e. simply verifying that your code is free of runtime errors, which would eliminate all memory safety-related bugs, including Heartbleed.
This would already be better than reimplementing in Rust, because the latter can protect from memory safety bugs but not other runtime bugs (such as division by zero, unexpected panics, etc).
BTW, this minimal verification effort would already eliminate the second bug in this security advisory.
You can then verify other simple properties, even function by function, no complicated models are even necessary at first.
For example, you could verify that your function that verifies a CA certificate, when passed the STRICT flag, is really more strict than when not passed the STRICT flag.
This would eliminate the first bug in this security advisory and all other similar bugs in the same function call-chain.
BTW, what I just said is really easy to specify, and I'm guessing it's also very easy to prove, since I'm guessing that the strict checks are just additional checks, while the normal checks are shared between the two verification modes.
Many other such properties are also easy to prove. The more difficult properties/models, or even full functional verification, can be implemented by more expert developers or even mathematicians.
I think the problem is also that OpenSSL devs, like the vast majority of devs, probably have no desire/intention/motivation/ability to do formal verification, otherwise you could even do this in the OpenSSL code base itself (although that is not ideal because verifying a program written in C requires more manual work than verifying it in a simpler language whose code extracts to C).
I'm also guessing that your budget estimate is an exaggeration since miTLS and EverCrypt, although admittedly projects whose scope has still not reached your ambitious goals (i.e. full functional verification of all layers in the stack), was probably done with a much smaller budget.
And it's not like you can't build on top of that and incrementally verify more properties over time, e.g. more layers of the stack or whatever.
You don't need a huge mega-project, just a starting point, and sufficient motivation.
> Well, sure, if your start with those premises, then I'm not surprised that you reach the conclusion that the goal is unachievable.
I didn't say unachievable. I said costly.
> First of all, if constructing a formal specification for PKIX is not possible, then that should be telling you that it either needs to be simplified, better specified or scrapped altogether for something better (the latter would require an extremely large transition period, I'm imagining, so the first two are much preferred in this situation).
The specs for the new thing would basically have to be written in Coq or similar. Even if you try real hard to keep it small and not make the... many mistakes made in PKIX's history... it would still be huge. And it would be even less accessible than PKIX already is.
> For example, you could verify that your function that verifies a CA certificate, when passed the STRICT flag, is really more strict than when not passed the STRICT flag.
That's just an argument for better testing. That's not implementation verification.
> This would eliminate the first bug in this security advisory and all other similar bugs in the same function call-chain.
Only if you thought to write that test to begin with. Writing a test for everything is... not really possible. SQLite3, one of the most tested codebases in the world, has a private testsuite that gets 100% branch coverage, and even that is not the same as testing every possible combination of branches.
> BTW, what I just said is really easy to specify, and I'm guessing it's also very easy to prove, since I'm guessing that the strict checks are just additional checks, while the normal checks are shared between the two verification modes.
It's not. The reason the strictness flag was added was that OpenSSL was historically less strict than the spec demanded. It turns out that when you're dealing with more than 30 years of history, you get kinks in the works. It wouldn't be different for whatever thing replaces PKIX.
> I think the problem is also that OpenSSL devs, like the vast majority of devs, probably have no desire/intention/motivation/ability to do formal verification, otherwise you could even do this in the OpenSSL code base itself [...]
You must be very popular at parties.
> I'm also guessing that your budget estimate is an exaggeration since miTLS and EverCrypt, [...]
Looking at miTLS, it only claims to be an implementation of TLS, not PKIX. Not surprising. EverCrypt is a cryptography library, not a PKIX library.
> That's just an argument for better testing. That's not implementation verification.
No, I'm not talking about testing, I'm talking about really basic formal verification:
forall (x: Certificate), verify_certificate(x, flags = 0) == invalid ==> verify_certificate(x, flags = STRICT) == invalid
This is trivial to specify and almost as trivial to prove to be correct for all inputs. Testing can't do that, no matter how good your testing.
> Only if you thought to write that test to begin with. Writing a test for everything is... not really possible.
I agree, but I'm not talking about testing. I'm talking about formal verification.
> It's not. The reason the strictness flag was added was that OpenSSL was historically less strict than the spec demanded. It turns out that when you're dealing with more than 30 years of history, you get kinks in the works. It wouldn't be different for whatever thing replaces PKIX.
That's totally fine and wouldn't affect the verification of that function at all. This is a very simple property to verify and it would avoid this bug and all similar bugs in that function (even if that function calls other functions, no matter how large or complex they are).
Other functions also have such easy to verify properties, this is not hard at all to come up with (although sure, some more difficult properties might be harder to verify).
> You must be very popular at parties.
I didn't want to be dismissive of OpenSSL devs or other devs in general, I just find it frustrating that there are so many myths surrounding this topic, and a lot less education, interest and investment than I think there should be, nowadays.
You are confusing verification as in "certificate" with verification as in "theorem proving", and you are still assuming a formal description of what to verify (which I'll remind you: doesn't exist). And then you go on to talk about myths and uneducated and uninterested devs. Your approach is like tilting at windmills, and will achieve exactly as much.
If I understood you correctly, then I am not confusing those two things.
Maybe you haven't noticed but I actually wrote a theorem about a hypothetical verify_certificate() function in my previous comment. Maybe you also haven't noticed, but I didn't need a formal description of how certificate validation needs to be done to write that theorem.
And I assure you, if the implementation of verify_certificate() is anything except absolute garbage, it would be very easy to prove the theorem to be correct. I actually have some experience doing this, you know? I'm not just parroting something I read, I've proved code to be 100% correct multiple times using formal verification (i.e. theorem proving) tools. That is, according to certain basic and reasonable assumptions, of course, like e.g. the hardware is not faulty or buggy while running the code, and that the compiler itself is not buggy, which would be a lot more rare than a bug in my code -- and even then, note that compilers and CPUs can be (and have been) formally verified.
Maybe you don't agree with my approach but I think it's the most realistic one for a project such as this and I am absolutely confident it would be practical, would completely eliminate most (i.e. more than 50%, at least) existing bugs with minimal verification effort (which almost anyone would be capable of doing with minimal training), and would steadily become more and more bug-free with additional, incremental verification (i.e. theorem proving) and refactoring effort.
https://project-everest.github.io/ :
> Focusing on the HTTPS ecosystem, including components such as the TLS protocol and its underlying cryptographic algorithms, Project Everest began in 2016 aiming to build and deploy formally verified implementations of several of these components in the F* proof assistant.
> […] Code from HACL*, ValeCrypt and EverCrypt is deployed in several production systems, including Mozilla Firefox, Azure Confidential Consortium Framework, the Wireguard VPN, the upcoming Zinc crypto library for the Linux kernel, the MirageOS unikernel, the ElectionGuard electronic voting SDK, and in the Tezos and Concordium blockchains.
S2n is Amazon's formally verified TLS library. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2n
IDK about a formally proven PKIX. https://www.google.com/search?q=formally+verified+pkix lists a few things.
A formally verified stack for Certificate Transparency would be a good way to secure key distribution (and revocation); where we currently depend upon a TLS library (typically OpenSSL), GPG + HKP (HTTP Key Protocol).
Fuzzing on an actual hardware - with stochastic things that persist bits between points in spacetime - is a different thing.
Funny, the first hit for that search you linked is... my comment above. The "few things" other than that are for alternatives to PKIX, which is fine and good, but PKIX will be with us for a long time yet. As for Everest, it jives with what I wrote above, that verified implementations of TLS are feasible (Everest also implements QUIC and similar), but -surprise!- not listed is PKIX.
I know, it sounds crazy, really crazy, but PKIX is much bigger than TLS. It's big. It's just big.
The crypto, you can verify. The session and presentation layers, you can verify. Heck, maybe you can verify your app. PKIX implementations of course can be verified in principle, but in fact it would require a serious amount of resources -- it would be really expensive. I hope someone does it, to be sure.
I suppose the first step would be to come up with a small profile of PKIX that's just enough for the WebPKI. Though don't be fooled, that's not really enough because people do use "mTLS" and they do use PKINIT, and they do use IPsec (mostly just for remote access) with user certificates, and DoD has special needs and they're not the only ones. But a small profile would be a start -- a formal specification for that is within the realm of the achievable in reasonably short order, though still, it's not small.
Both a gap and an opportunity; someone like an agency or a FAANG with a budget for something like this might do well to - invest in the formal methods talent pipeline and - very technically interface with e.g. Everest about PKIX as a core component in need of formal methods.
"The SSL landscape: a thorough analysis of the X.509 PKI using active and passive measurements" (2011) ... "Analysis of the HTTPS certificate ecosystem" (2013) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=16545...
TIL about "Frankencerts": Using Frankencerts for Automated Adversarial Testing of Certificate Validation in SSL/TLS Implementations (2014) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3525044230307445257... :
> Our first ingredient is "frankencerts," synthetic certificates that are randomly mutated from parts of real certificates and thus include unusual combinations of extensions and constraints. Our second ingredient is differential testing: if one SSL/TLS implementation accepts a certificate while another rejects the same certificate, we use the discrepancy as an oracle for finding flaws in individual implementations.
> Differential testing with frankencerts uncovered 208 discrepancies between popular SSL/TLS implementations such as OpenSSL, NSS, CyaSSL, GnuTLS, PolarSSL, MatrixSSL, etc.
W3C ld-signatures / Linked Data Proofs, and MerkleProof2017: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/lds-merkleproof2017/
"Linked Data Cryptographic Suite Registry" https://w3c-ccg.github.io/ld-cryptosuite-registry/
ld-proofs: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/ld-proofs/
W3C DID: Decentralized Identifiers don't solve for all of PKIX (x.509)?
"W3C DID x.509" https://www.google.com/search?q=w3c+did+x509
Thanks for the link about frankencerts!
How much total throughput can your wi-fi router really provide?
Out of curiosity does some company benchmark other types of commercial networking devices like this? Things like load balancers, DDoS protection, switches, etc.? How do businesses shop for such products without having a standard measure from an independent third party?
netperf and iperf are utilities for measuring network throughput: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iperf
It's possible to approximate the https://dslreports.com/speedtest using the flent CLI or QT GUI (which calls e.g. fping and netperf) and isolate out ISP variance by running a netperf server on a decent router and/or a workstation with a sufficient NIC (at least 1Gbps). https://flent.org/tests.html
`dslreports_8dn`: https://github.com/tohojo/flent/blob/master/flent/tests/dslr...
From https://flent.org/ :
> RRUL: Create the standard graphic image used by the Bufferbloat project to show the down/upload speeds plus latency in three separate charts:
> `flent rrul -p all_scaled -l 60 -H address-of-netserver -t text-to-be-included-in-plot -o filename.png`
In 2021, most routers - even with OpenWRT and hardware-offloading - cannot actually push 1 Gigabit over wired Ethernet, though the port spec does say 1000 Mbps.
The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy
It seems that nearly every "public good" in the Ethereum ecosystem got gobbled up by VCs and pivoted to for-profit endeavors. I don't mind VCs and I don't mind people seeking profit, but this moral high ground that Ethereum has been trying to build for itself is delusional. In practice it is just a marketing gimmick.
An astute observer may have noticed that Vitalik has a habit of coming up with definitions that only himself and the Ethereum foundation can meet the standards of.
The reality is everyone is just trying to make money. I think we are better off coming to terms with that instead of living in a collective fantasy.
Public goods are by definition non-rivalrous and non-excludable. How can they be gobbled?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
(I'm not being pedantic here. The concept of a public good, in this technical sense, is a very important concept to have -- and it's specifically the kind of "public goods" the article was talking about, along with ideas for improving their tendency to be under-supplied. Goods that can be gobbled up by someone tend to be produced at closer to the optimum amount, since there's a less diffuse private incentive for their production.)
Public goods ... Welfare economics ... Social choice theory, Arrow's, Indifference curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indifference_curve
People do collectibles; commemorative plates.
A few notes on message passing
[deleted]
The big problem nobody talks about with actors and message passing is non-determinism and state.
If two otherwise independent processes A and B are sending messages to a single process C, it's non-deterministic which arrives at C first. This can create a race condition. C may respond differently depending on which messages arrives first - A's or B's. This is also effectively an example of shared mutable state - the state of C, which can be mutated whenever a message is received - is shared with A and B because they're communicating with it and their messages work differently based on the current state.
Non-determinism, race-conditions, shared mutable state: the absolute opposite of what we want when dealing with concurrency and parallelism.
> Luckily, global orders are rarely needed and are easy to impose yourself (outside distributed cases): just let all involved parties synchronize with a common process.
When there are multiple agents/actors in a distributed system, and the timestamp resolution is datetime64, and clock synchronization and network latency are variable, and non-centralized resilience is necessary to eliminate single points of failure, global ordering is impractical to impossible because there is no natural unique key with which to impose a [partial] preorder [1][2]: there are key collisions when you try and merge the streams.
Just don't cross the streams.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preorder_(disambiguation)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set
The C in CAP theorem is for Consistency [3][4]. Sequential consistency is elusive because something probably has to block/lock somewhere unless you've optimally distributed the components of the CFG control flow graph.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistency_model
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
FWIU, TLA+ can help find such issues. [5]
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA%2B
Wouldn't a partial order be possible using logical clocks? Vector clocks probably don't satisfy "practical" but a hybrid logical clock is practical if you can assume clock synchronisation is within some modest delta.
> if you can assume clock synchronisation is within some modest delta.
From experience with clocks, you should really be actively testing the delta, and not just assuming it.
The assumption would be the limit you actively test for.
The Lamport timestamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp :
> The Lamport timestamp algorithm is a simple logical clock algorithm used to determine the order of events in a distributed computer system. As different nodes or processes will typically not be perfectly synchronized, this algorithm is used to provide a partial ordering of events with minimal overhead, and conceptually provide a starting point for the more advanced vector clock method.
Duolingo's language notes all on one page
Succinct. What a useful reference.
An IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) reference would be helpful, too. After taking linguistics in college, I found these Sozo videos of US english IPA consonants and vowels that simultaneously show {the ipa symbol, example words, someone visually and auditorily producing the phoneme from 2 angles, and the spectrogram of the waveform} but a few or a configurable number of [spaced] repetitions would be helpful: https://youtu.be/Sw36F_UcIn8
IDK how cartoonish or 3d of an "articulatory phonetic" model would reach the widest audience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics
IPA chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
IPA chart with audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
All of the IPA consonant chart played as a video: "International Phonetic Alphabet Consonant sounds (Pulmonic)- From Wikipedia.org" https://youtu.be/yFAITaBr6Tw
I'll have to find the link of the site where they playback youtube videos with multiple languages' subtitles highlighted side-by-side along with the video.
Found it: https://www.captionpop.com/
It looks like there are a few browser extensions for displaying multiple subtitles as well; e.g. "YouTube Dual Subtitles", "Two Captions for YouTube and Netflix"
Ask HN: The easiest programming language for teaching programming to young kids?
Hi,
I want to start a small community pilot project to help young kids, 8 and above, get interested in programming. We will use video games and robotics projects. We want to keep our tech stack as simple as possible. Here are some of the choices:
Godot + Aurdino: We can use C in Godot and Aurdino. Aurdino might be more interesting for kids as opposed neatly packaged Lego Kits.
Apple SpriteKit + Lego Mindstorm: We can use Swift with Legos. But cost will be higher.
Some of the projects we are thinking are:
Game-ish:
1. Sound visualizer like how Winamp and old school visualization were. Use speakers. And various other ideas around these concepts.
2. AR project that shows the world around you in cartoonish style. Swap faces etc.
3. Of cousre, platform games.
Robotics projects:
I see a lot of tutorials for Arduino such as robots that follow sound or light, or stuff like lights display. We will use mostly those.
Some harder project ideas I have are for drones, boats, and other navigational vehicles. This is why I want to use Arduino. But is C going to be too hard for young kids to play with?
What do you recommend? If this works, I would like to expand it and start a company around it.
awesome-python-in-education > "Python suitability for education" lists a few justifications for Python: https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#python...
There is a Scratch Jr for Android and iOS. You can view Scratch code as JS. JS does run in a browser, until it needs WASI.
awesome-robotics-libraries: https://github.com/jslee02/awesome-robotics-libraries
FWIU, ROS (Robot Operating System) is now installable with Conda/Mamba. There's a jupyter-ros and a jupyterlab-ros extension: https://github.com/RoboStack/jupyter-ros
I just found this: https://coderdojotc.readthedocs.io/projects/python-minecraft...
> This documentation supports the CoderDojo Twin Cities’ Build worlds in Minecraft with Python code group. This group intends to teach you how to use Python, a general purpose programming language, to mod the popular game called Minecraft. It is targeted at students aged 10 to 17 who have some programming experience in another language. For example, in Scratch.
K12CS Framework has your high-level CS curriculum: https://k12cs.org/ [PDF]: https://k12cs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/K%E2%80%9312-Co...
Educational technology > See also links to e.g. "Evidence-based education" and "Instructional theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology
Thank you for these resources, reviewing them now.
Yw. Np. So I just searched for "site: readthedocs.io kids python" https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areadthedocs.io+kids+p... and found a few new and old things:
SensorCraft (pyglet (Python + OpenGL)) from US AFRL Sensors Directorate has e.g. Gravity, Rocket Launch, and AI tutorials:
> Most people are familiar with Minecraft [...] for this project we are using a Minecraft type environment created in the Python programming language. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Sensors Directorate located in Dayton, Ohio created this guide to inspire kids of all ages to learn to program and at the same time get an idea of what it is like to be a Scientist or Engineer for the Air Force. We created this YouTube video about SensorCraft
https://sensorcraft.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html
`conda install -c conda-forge -y pyglet` should probably work. Miniforge on Win/Mac/Lin is an easy way to get Python installed on anything including ARM64 for a RPi or similar; `conda create -n scraft; conda install -c conda-forge -y python=3.8 jupyterlab jupytext jupyter-book pyglet` . If you're in a conda env, `pip install` should install things within that conda env. Here's the meta.yaml in the conda-forge pyglet-feedstock: https://github.com/conda-forge/pyglet-feedstock/blob/master/...
"BBC micro:bit MicroPython documentation" https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
$25 for a single board-computer with a battery pack and a case (and curricula) is very reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Bit
> The [micro:bit] is described as half the size of a credit card[10] and has an ARM Cortex-M0 processor, accelerometer and magnetometer sensors, Bluetooth and USB connectivity, a display consisting of 25 LEDs, two programmable buttons, and can be powered by either USB or an external battery pack.[2] The device inputs and outputs are through five ring connectors that form part of a larger 25-pin edge connector. (V2 adds a Mic and a Speaker)
Raspberry Pi for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser
This work (I think) worked with the mosquitos 30cm away with a servo scanning Pi Camera (1080p) and a 1W laser.
To work in the real world - cover a whole room or terrace - presumably a much higher resolution camera (or much faster scanning system) would be required. Even a 1W laser is dangerous to eyesight, if it was being fired at targets mingling with people.
The system could be mounted on small drones that would patrol larger areas - but the idea of robotic drones armed with lasers roaming around is beginning to sound worse than the mosquitos.
Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work!
Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - but will be happy firing the laser at random shadows and what not. And that was in a completely stationary setup and controlled lab conditions, i.e. not at all something resembling a typical poorly lit room!
This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons).
The "save the world" (mosquito control, diseases, etc.) justification is also par for the course for this type of crappy paper. Anyone who seriously thinks that one could control mosquito problem by shooting them one by one by a laser is delusional.
But neural networks and "AI" are being used, so it has to be cutting edge groundbreaking stuff, right?
BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago (including a slow motion video of a laser burning off wing of a mosquito in flight) and it seems that some Russian PhD student from a fairly obscure uni either didn't do their research or has reinvented the wheel (or just plain copied the thing without attribution). The list of irrelevant or only very tangentially relevant (it is about mosquitoes, so in scope, right?) references is a dead giveaway there (paper on mosquitoes spreading zika? seriously?).
Here, it was even on National Geographic in 2010(!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw
Oh and that was supposed to be a handheld device to boot. With the same "save the world from malaria" spiel too. I wonder what are the owners of the company that was pushing this concept to investors back then trying to sell today ...
There are actually multiple videos on Youtube showing products from different companies that were attempting to push this as some sort of viable concept.
> using a cheap camera
even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters.
and that's before you get into the software problem of processing the fire hose of data that is 4096x2160 at 60fps raw. and the hardware cost of a very serious workstation class PC capable of taking the capture at 1:1 realtime.
possibly a lidar based sensor or something might be more suitable to locating the x/y/z position of mosquitoes in a few meter area.
Mosquitos, as we all know, have a highly distinctive auditory signature.
A phased microphone array is the only sensible approach to localized mosquito detection. It would probably work reasonably well.
The problem is that the entire field is patent encumbered, because Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures has done some research on it, and no on in their right mind would go up against those guys.
Yeah, they already did sharks with lasers. IDK what the licensing terms are on that
ONE MILLION DOLLARS
Donate Unrestricted
The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives:
- The big failure in small schools initiative: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th...
- The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio...
- The big failure in Common Core initiative: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/...
Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/
Unbelievable.
Rather than diminishing the efforts of others, you could start helping by describing your own efforts to improve education (in order to qualify your ability to assess the mentioned and other efforts to improve education and learning)
In context to seed and series funding for a seat on a board of a for-profit venture, an NGO non-profit organization can choose whether to accept restricted donations and government organizations have elected public servant leaders who lead and find funding.
Works based on Faust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_Faust
Bitcoin Is Time
I'm ready to be downvoted to oblivion, especially by all the Bitcoin purists, but I hope my message sparks at least some curiosity.
Bitcoin is getting "weaker" every year for several reasons:
- emerging centralization due to economies of scale. If this trend continues the mining power will be so consolidated that a 51% attack will be likely. The Nakamoto coefficient is already at 4, and tending towards 3.
- energy usage due to Proof of Work is growing astronomically, and the higher the price of bitcoin, the less incentive there is to use renewable energy. Bitcoin uses more energy than the country of Argentina.
- transaction times are SLOW, and expensive. The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising.
There is a better alternative. RaiBlocks, named nano since 2018. It got a bad rap due to the BitGrail hack, but it's picking up steam again. The developer community is great, the main dev team on the Nano protocol has been consistently chugging along regardless of the 3 years of crypto winter on a shoestring budget and the nano community is made up of users, not speculators.
This article sums it up quite nicely: https://senatusspqr.medium.com/why-nano-is-the-ultimate-stor...
I'm happy to receive downvotes, but all I ask in return is that you give it a read with an open mind.
> The lightning network is incredibly buggy and won't actually solve the problems it's promising.
Not an expert but I found that a readable summary of different layer 2 scaling strategies and why Ethereum developers prefer Rollups instead of Channels (like Lightning):
"Bitcoin scalability problem" could link to the Ethereum design docs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem
The Ethereum design docs could link to direct-listed premined [stable] coins as a solution for Proof of Work and TPS reports: https://github.com/flare-eng/coston#smart-contracts-with-xrp
(edit) re: n-layer solutions: The https://interledger.org/ RFCs and something like Transaction Permission Layer (TPL) will probably be helpful for interchain compliance.
> Interledger is not tied to a single company, blockchain, or currency.
From https://tplprotocol.org/ :
> The challenge: Current blockchain-based protocols lack an effective governance mechanism that ensures token transfers comply with requirements set by the project that issued the token.
> Projects need to set requirements for a variety of reasons. For instance, remaining compliant with securities laws, limiting transfer to beta testers, or limiting transfer to a particular geo-spatial location. Whatever your reason, if a requirement can be verified by a third-party, TPL will be able to help.
In the US, S-Corps can't have international or more than n shareholders, for example; so if firms even wanted to issue securities on a first-layer network, they'd need an extra-chain compliance mechanism to ensure that their issuance is legal pursuant to local, sovereign, necessary policies. Re-issuing stock certificates is something that has to be done sometimes. When is it possible to cancel outstanding tokens?
Foundational Distributed Systems Papers
From "Ask HN: Learning about distributed systems?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932271 :
> Papers-we-love > Distributed Systems: https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/tree/master...
> awesome-distributed-systems also has many links to theory: https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed-systems
And links to more lists of distributed systems papers under "Meta Lists": https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed-systems#me...
In reviewing this awesome list, today I learned about this playlist: "MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Spring 2020)" https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...
> awesome-bigdata lists a number of tools: https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-bigdata
Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote (2007) [video]
"Interactive whiteboard" / "smart board" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_whiteboard
Wii Remote > Features > Sensing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Remote#Sensing
.. > Third-Party Development describes a number of applications for IR/optical tracking with an array of nonstationary emitters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Remote#Third-party_develop...
Augmented Reality (AR) > Technology > Tracking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality#Tracking
... links to "VR positional tracking" which does have headings for "Optical" and "Sensor fusion": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_positional_tracking
How to Efficiently Choose the Right Database for Your Applications
I kinda disagree with separate branch for "document database" for Mongo. Mongo is a key-value storage, with a thin wrapper that converts BSON<->JSON, and indices on subfields.
You can achieve exactly the same thing with PostgreSQL tables with two columns (key JSONB PRIMARY KEY, value JSONB), including indices on subfields. With way more other functionality and support options.
> You can achieve exactly the same thing with PostgreSQL tables with two columns (key JSONB PRIMARY KEY, value JSONB), including indices on subfields. With way more other functionality and support options.
PostgreSQL docs > "JSON Functions and Operators" https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-json.html
MongoDB can do jsonSchema:
> Document Validator¶ You can use $jsonSchema in a document validator to enforce the specified schema on insert and update operations:
db.createCollection( <collection>, { validator: { $jsonSchema: <schema> } } )
db.runCommand( { collMod: <collection>, validator:{ $jsonSchema: <schema> } } )
Looks like there are at least 2 ways to handle JSONschema with Postgres: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22228525/json-schema-val... ; neither of which are written in e.g. Rust or Go.
Is there a good way to handle JSON-LD (JSON Linked Data) with Postgres yet?
There are probably 10 comparisons of triple stores with rule inference slash reasoning on data ingress and/or egress.
A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View
Sometime when I am old(er) and (somehow?) have more time, I'd like to jot down a "Rosetta Stone" of which buzzwords map to the same concepts. So often we change our vocabulary every decade without changing what we're really talking about.
Things started out in a scholarly vein, but the rush of commerce hasn't allowed much time to think where we're going. — James Thornton, Considerations in computer design (1963)
Like a Linked Data thesaurus with typed, reified edges between nodes/concepts/class_instances?
Here's the WordNet RDF Linked Data for "jargon"; like the "Jargon File": http://wordnet-rdf.princeton.edu/lemma/jargon
A Semantic MediaWiki Thesaurus? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki :
> Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic searches, used for aggregation of pages, displayed in formats like maps, calendars and graphs, and exported to the outside world via formats like RDF and CSV.
Google Books NGram viewer has "word phrase" term occurrence data by year, from books: https://books.google.com/ngrams
There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like.
The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. What we did moved very little of the top revenue metric. It made little difference if I worked like a dog, or slacked. The promos were very much “buddy buddy” system.
In the end I realized you can’t have startups in big companies (esp as an engineer you don’t have the huge upside if the startup is successful, your upside is capped)
Startups work because you have skin in the game, when you build something people want, you get to reap rewards proportional to it. That correlation and feedback loop is very important.
At big companies you don’t have the the same correlation. Some big shot exec they hired reaps far far more on the work you did.
Equity is what builds wealth.
>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock.
I joined a startup in 1999. There were 3 founders and I was employee #2 after that. I received a ton of options (this was before RSUs became popular). We had a great product and a great team, but 18 months later ran out of money and unfortunately it was right after the dotcom implosion of early 2001 when funding had completely dried up.
My takeaway was that base salary is actually the most important component of TC. Cash bonus based on some metric that you control comes second. Equity comes third. If you work for a FAANG, maybe equity can move higher up (though it remains to be seen how long this will be true).
Outside of FAANG (and top executives at F500 sized public companies) very few people are getting rich off of the "equity" component of their TC. The vast majority of startups go bust before IPO or acquisition.
Time is the most valuable commodity you have, don't squander it for lottery tickets and empty promises.
>Time is the most valuable commodity you have, don't squander it for lottery tickets and empty promises.
That goes the other way around too, the only way to have massive amounts of free time without going FIRE is to win the lottery. So why not throw the dice once or twice when you're young and then settle into a stable corporate job if it doesn't pay out?
Modern Silicon Valley lets you do both. Why not throw the dice and still make around $200k cash?
As a [good] engineer you can have your cake and eat it too. Sure it won’t make you a billionaire but you can live a comfy life, maybe win the lottery, and retire at 50 if the lottery fails.
Living and working elsewhere with the wages of the region reduces expenses and opportunities; but the wealth of educational resources online [1][2] does make it feasible to even bootstrap a company on the side. Do you need to borrow money to scale quickly enough to pay expenses with sufficient cash flow for the foreseeable future?
Income sources: Passive income, Content, Equity that's potentially worth nothing, a backtested diversified portfolio (Golden Butterfly or All Weather Portfolio and why?) of sustainable investments, Business models [3]; Software implementations of solutions to businesses, organizations, and/or consumers' opportunities
Single-payer / Universal Healthcare is a looming family expense for many entrepreneurs; many of whom do get into entrepreneurship later in life.
Small businesses make up a significant portion of GDP. Small businesses have to have to accept risk.
There's still opportunity in the world.
[1] Startup School > Curriculum https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/library
[3] "Business models based on the compiled list at [HN]" https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324
From "Why companies lose their best innovators (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887903 :
> "Intrapreneurial." What does that even mean? The employee, within their specialized department, spends resources (time, money, equipment) on something that their superior managers have not allocated funding for because they want: (a) recognition; (b) job security; (c) to save resources such as time and money; (d) to work on something else instead of this wasteful process; (e) more money.
I’d you are going to start something on the side, carefully read your current employment agreement, particularly the part about IP assignment. Most Silicon Valley companies I’ve worked with, including FAANGs, claim ownership of everything you produce, inside or outside of employment, at home or in office, using their equipment or yours. You don’t want to lick into a unicorn idea and have your former employer’s lawyers send you that letter...
Unusual data point (I'm not sure if South African practice is applicable elsewhere) , but most bigger corps I've worked at have provided a mechanism to declare external interests, pending management approval, to work around these global clauses.
On paper any IP would be default belong to the Corp, but after some discussion/negotiations with your line manager and his higher-ups, you could do the paper work to declare.
Are these actually enforceable?
It probably doesn’t matter in practice. They will have more lawyers and more money to burn on legal process than you. Who will go bankrupt first fighting a legal battle between you and, say, Apple?
In practice, I don't think I've ever seen a SV example of that kind of litigation from garage development of IP. Maybe I've just missed them?
Theft of IP from one company to a new company on the other hand there are multiple public examples of.
The only time they'd actually sue is if you made something worth money. in that case, there's a good chance you can get investors to pay the lawsuit.
It does matter in practice in California.
If its "related" to your employers business yes - unless you agree a variation of the contract.
Ask HN: Keyrings: per-package/repo; commit, merge, and release keyrings?
Are there existing specs for specifying per-package release keyrings and per-repo commit and merge keyrings?
Keyring: a collection of keys imported into a datastore with review.
DevOpsSec; Software Supply Chain Security
Packages {X, Y, Z} in Indexes {A, B, C} are artifacts that are output from Builds (on workstations or servers with security policies) which build a build script (which is often deliberately not specified with a complete programming language in order to minimize build complexity; instead preferring YAML) which should be drawn from a stable commit hash in a Repository (which may be a copy of technically zero or more branches of a Repository hosted centrally next to Issues and Build logs and Build artifact Signing Keys).
Maxmimally, are there potentially more keyrings (or key authorization mappings between key and permission) than (1) commit; (2) merge; and (3) release?
Source Projects: Commit, Merge, [Run Build, Login to post-build env], Release (and Sign) package
Downstream Distros: Commit, Merge, [Run Build, Login to post-build env], Release (and Sign) package for the {testing, stable, security} (Signed) Index catalogs
Threat Actors Now Target Docker via Container Escape Features
It may be quipped that Docker or Kubernetes is remote code execution (RCE) as a service!
The vulnerability pointed out here is server operators who have exposed Docker's API to the public internet, allowing anyone to run a container. The use of a privileged container is just icing on the cake, and probably not nessecary for a cryptominer.
A more subtle and interesting attack vector is genuine container imags that become compromised, much like any other package manager, particularly ones that search for the Docker API on the host's internal IP address, hoping only public network access is firewalled.
Docker engine docs > "Protect the Docker daemon socket" https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/protect-access/
dev-sec/cis-docker-benchmark /controls: https://github.com/dev-sec/cis-docker-benchmark/tree/master/...
Eh. This advice is less practical than it’s made to seem. Like it “works” but it’s not really usable for anything other than connecting two privileged apps over a hostile network.
* Docker doesn’t support CRLs so any compromised cert means reissuing everyone’s cert.
* Docker’s permissions are all or nothing without a plug-in. And if you’re going that route the plug-in probably has better authentication.
* Docker’s check is just “is the cert signed by the CA” so you have to do one CA per machine / group homogeneous machines.
* You either get access to the socket or not with no concept of users so you get zero auditing.
* Using SSH as transport helps but then you have to also lock down SSH which isn’t impossible but more work and surface area to cover than feels necessary. Also since your access is still via the Unix socket it’s all or non permissions again.*
django-ca is one way to manage a PKI including ACMEv2, OCSP, and a CRL (Certificate Revocation) list: https://github.com/mathiasertl/django-ca
"How can I verify client certificates against a CRL in Golang?" mentions a bit about crypto/tls and one position on CRLs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37058322/how-can-i-verif...
CT (Certificate Transparency) is another approach to validating certs wherein x.509 cert logs are written to a consistent, available blockchain (or in e.g. google/trillian, a centralized db where one party has root and backup responsibilities also with Merkle hashes for verifying data integrity). https://certificate.transparency.dev/ https://github.com/google/trillian
Does docker ever make the docker socket available over the network, over an un-firewalled port by default? Docker Swarm is one config where the docker socket is configured to be available over TLS.
Docker Swarm docs > "Manage swarm security with public key infrastructure (PKI)" https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/how-swarm-mode-works/pk... :
> Run `docker swarm ca --rotate` to generate a new CA certificate and key. If you prefer, you can pass the --ca-cert and --external-ca flags to specify the root certificate and to use a root CA external to the swarm. Alternately, you can pass the --ca-cert and --ca-key flags to specify the exact certificate and key you would like the swarm to use.
Docker ("moby") and podman v3 socket security could be improved:
> From "ENH,SEC: Create additional sockets with limited permissions" https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/38879 ::
> > An example use case: securing the Traefik docker driver:
> > - "Docker integration: Exposing Docker socket to Traefik container is a serious security risk" https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/4174#issuecomment-...
> > > It seems it only require (read) operations : ServerVersion, ContainerList, ContainerInspect, ServiceList, NetworkList, TaskList & Events.
> > - https://github.com/liquidat/ansible-role-traefik
> > > This role does exactly that: it launches two containers, a traefik one and another to securely provide limited access to the docker socket. It also provides the necessary configuration.
> > - ["What could docker do to make it easier to do this correctly?"] https://github.com/Tecnativa/docker-socket-proxy/issues/13
> > - [docker-socket-proxy] Creates a HAproxy container that proxies limited access to the [docker] socket
This looks like the attacker is just using a publicly exposed Docker API honeypot to run a new Docker container with `privileged: true`. I don't see why that's particularly interesting given that they could just bind-mount the host / filesystem with `pid: host` and do pretty much whatever they want?
It would be much more interesting to see a remote-code-execution attack against some vulnerable service deploying a container escape payload to escalate privileges from the Docker container to the host.
Exposed on the WAN is obviously bad, but how do you keep your own containers from calling those APIs? Yes, you don't mount the docker socket in the container, but what about the orchestrator APIs?
With kubernetes, you enable RBAC, and only allow each pod the absolute minimum of access required.
In my own setup, I have only five pods with any privileges: kubernetes-dashboard, nginx-ingress, prometheus, cert-manager, and the gitlab-runner, and of those only kubernetes-dashboard can modify existing pods in all spaces, cert-manager can only write secrets of its own custom type, and gitlab-runner can spawn non-privileged pods in its own namespace (but not mount anything from the host, nor any resources from any other namespace).
And when building docker images in the CI, I use google’s kaniko to build docker images from within docker without any privileges (it unpacks docker images for building and runs them inside the existing container, basically just chroot).
All these APIs are marked very clearly and obviously as DO NOT MAKE AVAILABLE PUBLICLY. If you still make them public, well it’s pretty much your own fault.
Does RBAC not limit these by default? Does cert-manger not already give itself restricted permission on install? Do I need to fix up my cluster right now? If so, do you have any example RBAC yamls? :D
> And when building docker images in the CI, I use google’s kaniko to build docker images from within docker without any privileges (it unpacks docker images for building and runs them inside the existing container, basically just chroot).
You can also use standalone buildkit which comes with the added benefit of being able to use the same builder locally natively.
No RBAC doesn't automatically do this. And many publicly available Helm charts are missing these basic security configurations. You should use Gatekeeper or similar to enforce these settings throughout your cluster.
Gatekeeper docs: https://open-policy-agent.github.io/gatekeeper/website/docs/
Gatekeeper src: https://github.com/open-policy-agent/gatekeeper
awesome-container-security: https://github.com/kai5263499/awesome-container-security
"container-security" GitHub label: https://github.com/topics/container-security
In somewhat related news, rootless Docker support is no longer an experimental feature. Has anyone used it and liked/disliked it?
I have, and it's great/you forget about it pretty quickly. I've actually gone (rootful?)docker->(rootless)podman->(rootless)docker, and I've written about it:
- https://vadosware.io/post/rootless-containers-in-2020-on-arc...
- https://vadosware.io/post/bits-and-bobs-with-podman/
- https://vadosware.io/post/back-to-docker-after-issues-with-p...
I still somewhat long after podman's lack of a daemon but some of the other issues with it currently leave it completely out for me (now that docker has caught up) -- for example lack of linking support.
Podman works great outside of those issues though, you just have to be careful if it does something in a way that expects docker semantics (usually the daemon or an unix socket on disk somewhere). You'll also find some cutting edge tools like dive[0] also have some support for podman[1] but it's not necessarily the usual case.
podman v3 has a docker-compose compatible socket. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107022 :
> "Using Podman and Docker Compose" https://podman.io/blogs/2021/01/11/podman-compose.html
Ask HN: What security is in place for bank-to-bank EFT?
When I set up an ETF on a bank's website, all I need to enter is the other bank's routing number and account number, which can be readily found on a paper check. Then you can transfer money from one bank to another... What security and authentication is in place to prevent fraud? In case of fraud, is the victim guaranteed to get the money back?
AFAIU, no existing banking transaction systems require the receiver to confirm in order to receive a funds transfer.
You can create a "multisig" DLT smart contract that requires multiple parties' signatures before the [optionally escrowed] funds are actually transferred.
EFT: Electronic Funds Transfer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_funds_transfer
As far as permissions to write to the account ledger: Check signatures are scanned. Cryptoasset keys are very long, high-entropy "passwords". US debit cards are chip+pin; it's not enough to just copy down the card number (and CVV code).
Though credit cards typically are covered by fraud protection, debit card transactions typically aren't: hopefully something will be recovered, but AFAIU debit txs might as well be as unreversible as cryptoasset transactions.
TPL: Transaction Permission Layer is one proposed system for permissions in blockchain; so that e.g. {proof of residence, receiver confirmation, accredited investor status, etc.} can be necessary for a transaction to go through.
ILP: Interledger Protocol > RFC 32 > "Peering, Clearing and Settling" describes how ~EFT with Interledger works: https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen...
Podman: A Daemonless Container Engine
Is the title of this page out of date?
AFAIU, Podman v3 has a docker-compose compatible socket and there's a daemon; so "Daemonless Container Engine" is no longer accurate.
"Using Podman and Docker Compose" https://podman.io/blogs/2021/01/11/podman-compose.html
Podman does not run in a daemon-mode by default. There's a dbus-activated service unit that activates the daemon when you try to use Docker Compose with it.
It is almost 100% compatible with docker. I only had to do minimal changes in my Dockerfiles to use it.
But not Buildkit and docker-compose.
Podman v3 is compatible with docker-compose (but not yet swarm mode, FWIU), has a socket and a daemon that services it.
Buildah (`podman buildx`, `buildah bud --arch arm64`) just gained multiarch build support; so also building arm64 containers from the same Dockerfile is easy now. https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/1590
IDK what BuildKit features should be added to Buildah, too?
> IDK what BuildKit features should be added to Buildah, too?
Cache mounts are what we rely on for incremental rebuilds.
Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back in the days, but anyways.
The reason I have never mined nor bought into it is that I still, to this day struggle to come up with a real reason to do so.
Am I getting too old? Do I not see the "huge potential" what it may become? Don't I want to get freaking rich? I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for. Can someone help me out here?
I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware).
It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is practically non-existent / all left up to chance.
It does take a rocket science to see the trends, as long as it's tied to needing hardware to compute arbitrary calculations to work... It's going to waste computer resources and energy. Both which are finite resources... Yes finite, solar cells aren't free to make, they don't last forever after you make them. Same with any other green technology. Maybe if fusion was our only power source it would be less of a concern, but we still haven't cracked Q=1, so... Yes it is a waste of finite resources.
It’s not draining the GPU industry. No one buys GPUs for mining Bitcoin anymore, they use ASICs.
Even as just ASICs there's something of a drain, Bitcoin ASICs consume fab production which means less remaining production capacity for GPUs.
This is an equilibrium that should eventually fix itself, but while Bitcoin and crypto mining is growing they are making a material dent in the global semiconductor economy.
Cryptoasset mining creates demand for custom chip fab (how different are mining rigs from SSL/TLS accelerator expansion cards), which is definitely not zero sum: more revenue = more opportunities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply
With insufficient demand, a market does not develop into a sustainable market. "Rule of three (economics)" says that markets are stable with 3 major competitors and many smaller competitors; nonlinearity and game theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(economics)
We've always had custom chip fab, but the prices used to be much higher. Proof of Work (and Proof of Research) incentivize microchip and software energy efficiency; whereas we had observed and been most concerned with doublings in transistor density.
FWIU, it's now more sustainable and profitable to mine rare earth elements from recycled electronics than actually digging real value out of the earth?
Compared to creating real value by digging for gold, how do we value financial services?
Bitcoin's fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact
If the price of energy is calculated with corresponding carbon tax included, shouldn't Bitcoin be neutral?
> If the price of energy is calculated with corresponding carbon tax included, shouldn't Bitcoin be neutral?
Yes, but there are vastly more energy efficient substitute DLTs with near-zero switching costs. Litecoin and scrypt (instead of AES256), for example.
Apply a USD/kWhr threshold across all industries.
Is this change (and focus on the external costs of energy production) more the result of penalties or incentives?
Pre-mined coins are vastly more energy efficient (with tx costs <1¢ and similarly minimal kWhr/tx costs), but the market doesn't trust undefined escrow terms that are fair game in commodities and retail markets.
We have trouble otherwise storing energy from noon to commute and dinner time; whereas a commodity like grain may keep for quite awhile.
Bitcoin serves as a demand subsidy when heavily-subsidized energy prices crash due to oversupply (that we should recognize as temporary because we are moving to electric vehicles and we need to reach production volumes so that, in comparison to alternatives, renewables are now more cost effective)
In the US, we have neither carbon taxes nor intraday prices. The EU has carbon taxes and electrical energy markets.
>In the US, we have neither carbon taxes nor intraday prices.
Like, no intraday electricity market?
Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
2021 Edition. This is a continuation of the previous two threads which can be found here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22299180
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13660086
Other resources:
https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x
https://github.com/AlgoryL/Projects-from-Scratch
https://github.com/tuvtran/project-based-learning
"Agile Web Development with Rails [6]" (2020) teaches TDD and agile in conjunction with a DRY, CoC, RAD web application framework: https://g.co/kgs/GNqnWV
Is it wrong to demand features in open-source projects?
Yes, it's wrong to demand something for nothing: that's entitlement, not business (which involves some sort of equitable exchange of goods and/or services).
Better questions: How do I file a BUG report issue, create a feature ENHancement request issue, send a pull request with a typo fix, write DOCs and send a PR, write test cases for a bug report?
How can I sponsor development of a feature?
A project may define a `.github/FUNDING.yml`, which GitHub will display on the 'Sponsor' tab of the GitHub project. A project may also or instead include funding information in their /README.md.
How do I ask IRC or a mailing list or issues how much and how long it would cost to develop a feature, if somebody had some international stablecoin and a limited term agreement?
The answer may be something like, "thanks for the detailed use case or user story, that's on our roadmap, there are major issues blocking similar features and that's where the expense would be."
CompilerGym: A toolkit for reinforcement learning for compiler optimization
What a great idea. Would per-instruction/opcode costs make this easier to optimize?
Are MuZero or the OpenAI baselines useful for RL compiler optimization?
Turning desalination waste into a useful resource
Tangentially related: there are millions of abandoned oil wells emitting greenhouse gases like methane across the US. Vice had a great video about this last month, but it didn't get much attention here on HN. [1] [2]
Evcxr: A Rust REPL and Jupyter Kernel
I have been using evcxr for the last 2-3 weeks and I'm loving it. There are two things that bother me: (a) fancy UI components seem to only work with Python and C++ kernel (not theoretically, but with available packages), (b) while you can redefine values and functions when you're iterating, you cannot do so with structs (yes, big structs go to a local package that I depend on, but sometimes I have ad-hoc utility structs).
Here's the xeus-cling (Jupyter C++ Kernel) source: https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus-cling/tree/master/src
Do any of the other non-Python Jupyter kernels have examples of working fancy UI components? https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels
Jupyter kernels implement the Jupyter kernel message spec. Introspection, Completion: https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...
Debugging (w/ DAP: Debug Adapter Protocol) https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...
A `display_data` Jupyter kernel message includes a `data` key with a dict value: "The data dict contains key/value pairs, where the keys are MIME types and the values are the raw data of the representation in that format." https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...
This looks like it does something with MIME bundles: https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus-cling/blob/00b1fa69d17b...
ipython.display: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/IPython/displ...
ipython.core.display: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/IPython/core/...
ipython.lib.display: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/blob/master/IPython/lib/d...
You can also run Jupyter kernels in a shell with jupyter/jupyter_console:
pip install jupyter-console jupyter-client
jupyter kernelspec list
jupyter console --kernel python3Ask HN: What is the cost to launch a SaaS business MVP
I interviewed several entrepreneurs, I noticed several spent so much money on developing their product before launch. What is your experience?
When you're not yet paying yourself, your costs are your living costs and opportunity costs (in addition to the given fixed and variable dev and prod deployment cloud costs).
Early feedback from actual customers on an MVP can save lots of development time. GitLab Service Desk is one way to handle emails as issues from users who don't have GitLab accounts.
A beta invite program / mailing list signup page costs very little to set up; you can start building your funnel while you're developing the product.
Cryptocurreny crime is way ahead of regulators and law enforcement
I used to be surprised when I would read articles about this mythical legislative process which can and will protect lowly plebians like me. I'm not sure why so many people are under the impression legislation will be able to keep up with perversely motivated individuals or groups. Who are these legislators with motives so pure that they will never be bribed to only look out for my interests? Let's never forget there is only one person in jail for the 2008 crash this article is trying to convince us was the result of too little regulation. There was never enough incentive to protect us from the people who created that market crash.
I think the problem with 2008 was that no one was doing anything illegal, just a lot of poor judgement and lack of regulations.
Bitcoin was created by people who were so peeved at the regulator's interventions in the '08 crisis that they decided that bypassing the entire financial system was the best option. Forever immortalising "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" just as a reminder of why they were doing what they did [0].
We don't need better regulation. We need, when financial firms muck up on a global scale, to replace the people who run those firms with different people. There is an easy way to do that, let them go broke.
The biggest problem in the room is that the regulators have bought in to the idea that some companies are "too big to fail". That is a stupid idea, fundamentally unfair, completely throwing out the best part of capitalism which is that recognised idiots aren't allowed to be in charge. That problem will certainly not be solved by giving the regulators more power.
Bitcoin was created in context to "Transparency and Accountability": a campaign motto not coincidentally found in the title of the "Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006".
> The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (S. 2590)[2] is an Act of Congress that requires the full disclosure to the public of all entities or organizations receiving federal funds beginning in fiscal year (FY) 2007. The website USAspending.gov opened in December 2007 as a result of the act
Sen. Obama's office is the origin of this bill; which was fronted by Sens Coburn and McCain, who had the clout.
https://usaspending.gov/ creates a mandatory database with budgetary line item metadata. Where money actually goes is something that is far more transparent and accountable with bitcoin and other public ledgers than any existing ledger covered by bank secrecy laws.
For context, in 2008-09, global financial systems were failing as a result of the American economy: housing bubble burst, HFT "flash crash" that we didn't have CAT or big data tools to determine the cause of, DDOS attacks and cyber security losses increasing YoY, credit default swaps had been rated as AAA securities (they sold bundled bad debt like it was worth something, and then wrote down losses), Enron energy speculation amidst rolling blackouts that were leaving hospitals in the dark, on gas generators, government investments in renewables had been paltry since the Carter administration had put solar panels on the roof of the White House before the whole oil price shock, and oil commodity speculation had driven the price of oil to like 2-4x the 2000 price (with resultant price effects on most CPI inflation/PPP basket goods); but electricity consumption was down in 2008 and renewables hadn't reached production volumes necessary to reach the competitive price point that renewables now present: cheaper than nonrenewables.
Who would have thought that the speculative price would continue to exceed the production cost. incentives or penalties?
Externalities per dollar returned per kWh is one way to assess the total costs of electricity production methods.
"Buy Gold" was the refrain of the day: TV commercials, signs out in front of piano stores (a somewhat-arbitrary commodity, sales of which are observed to be a leading indicator of economic health), signs on the road. And the message was "take your money out the market and put it in gold" which drives up the prices for chips and boards and medical equipment that rely upon that commodity as a material input. Gold is necessary for tropical spec components in high-humidity environments: gold hinges are prized, for example.
But, "look, there's water flowing from the chocolate fountain; so you can go ahead and go" and "you know you want to put it back in there, in that market" we're the appropriate messages given our revenue at the time.
For further technology scene context in 2007-2009,
"Grid computing" links to a number of distributed computing projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing#History
IIRC, there was a production metric-priced grid system developed around Seattle/Vancouver called "Gold" (?) that was built on Xen and is likely a precursor to metric-priced Cloud services like EC2 and S3 (which now simplify calculations for how much a 51% attack against a Proof of Work txpool with adaptive tx fees costs with n good participants in the game) which incentivize efficiency by penalizing expensive operations.
Code bloat was already a thing: how is everything getting slower when Moore's Law predicts the growth rate in transistor density? Are there sufficient incentives for code efficiency when there seem to be surplus compute resources just idly depreciating.
MySQL primary/secondary replication was considered a viable distributed database system, but securing replication depends upon cert exchange and (optionally), PKI, DNS, and IP tunnels of some sort. And then who has root, write to the journal and tables and indexes on the filesystem, UPDATE, and DELETE access in an inter-organizational distributed systems architecture with XML, Web Services, our very own ESB to scale separately from the database replication and off-site backups that nobody ever checks against the online data, and fragmented and varyingly-implemented industry standards that hopefully specify at least a sufficient key for the record that's unique across ledgers/systems/databases.
BitTorrent DHT magnet: links were extant.
Linden Dollars in Linden Lab's Second Life (there's a price floor on land, which is necessary to sell digital assets/goods/products/services) and accumulated avatar value in e.g. EverQuest and WarCraft (for which there were secondhand markets).
ACH was ACH: GPG-signed files over SFTP on the honor of the audited bank to not allow transfers that deposit money that doesn't exist.
There was no common struct for banking APIs (as apparently only e.g. Plaid, Quicken, and Mint solve for): ledger transactions have a fixed width text field that may contain multiple fields concatenated into one string, and there's no "payee URI" column in the QIF or CSV dumps of an account ledger.
To request more than e.g. the past 90 days of one's own checking account ledger, one was expected to parse tables out of per-month PDFs with e.g. PDFminer at $20 apiece, and then think up ones own natural key in order to merge and lookup records because (2008-01-01,3.99) and (2008-01-01,3.99,storename) are indistinct as a natural key (and when hashed). If you loan a your bank money (for them to now freely invest in the other side, since GLBA in 1999), wouldn't you think that the least they can do is give you `SELECT * WHERE account_id=?` as a free CSV without any datetime limitation in regards to what's offline and what's online.
"Audit the Fed", "Audit DoD" were being chanted by economically-aware citizens amidst severe correction and what was then the most severe recession since the Great Depression: the "Great Recession" it was called, and payouts to essential cronies (who hadn't saved wheat for the famine) were essential.
Overdraft was an error charged to the customer, who didn't build an inconsistent system (CAP theorem) that allows spending money that doesn't exist (at interest charged to the consumer/taxpayer).
"Catch Me If You Can" (2002) described the controls for bank fraud at the time. Why are fees so high?
"Office Space" (1999) described penny-shabing / salami-slicing attack: "fractions of a penny".
"Beverly Hills Ninja" (1997) detailed the story of the Great White Ninja and Tanley! (fistpalm)
"Swordfish" (1999) described a domestic disaster and bank transfers confirmable in seconds.
Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
Amazon aws and related services can charge you a rate per email, or per unit time of computation, so why can't news sites just charge you $0.01 to read an article, or even half that?
For reference, there's Web Monetization [1] which tries to solve exactly that.
As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support. Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or subscription financed models.
Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better demographics data/statistics.
https://webmonetization.org/ lists Coil (flat $5/mo) as the first Web Monetization provider: https://coil.com/
Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the <1¢ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able to achieve.
I really like their approach and I paid for Flattr for quite a while when it started. But something big needs to push them to the critical adoption rate. On a number of very techy blog posts, I got... 0 from WebMonetization. And that's on best case audience (coming from HN and tech Reddit).
Elon Musk announces $100M carbon capture prize
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon :
> The $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE develops breakthrough technologies to convert CO₂ emissions into usable products.
CCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
CCU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_utilization
Sequestration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data
Interesting in a technological sense, but what problem it solves isn’t obvious to me. It lets me granularly authorize first party access what data I have in my pod, but there can’t be any technical guarantees with regards to illegitimate sharing or otherwise copying (many might at least cache, for instance) – nor about what is collected and shared outside this system.
I keep seeing data-hubs and identity-providers touting themselves as solutions to the web's privacy issues, but I don't see how they actually solve anything.
It seems like an attempted technical solution to a social problem to me.
The real problem with data based services (ads, Google search, etc) is really that a bunch of data is collected opaquely, unethically, and in some cases illegally. The whole system including data brokers and real time bidding is out of control.
In my (personal) view, it's the technical part of a solution that definitely also needs to have a social/legislative component. It cannot prevent parties from illegitimate sharing of my data, but it does give them the option to hand over control to me. There are lots of companies that currently hold data on us but for whom that data is not their primary competency, and they only need a small nudge (like GDPR) to make having the customer responsible for that data an attractive proposition.
You might be right, but I think it's disingenuous to market it as though this "solves privacy". Worst case, people are lulled into a false sense of security.
Data-storage + authorization doesn't solve any (new) technical privacy-issues; this is "data protection" rather than "data privacy" in my book.
While I recognize the value of W3C LDP and SOLID, I also fail to see anything in SOLID that prevents B from sharing A's now pod-siloed information.
Does it prevent screenshots and OCR?
So it's in standard record structs and that makes it harder for the bad guys?
Who moderates mean memes with my face on them?
It is my hope that future Linked Data spec tutorials model something benign like shapes or cells instead of people: so that we can still see the value.
Laws still exist against things like perjury, even though the existence of the law is not a technical means in itself able to prevent perjury. Note that one of the comments upthread specifically mentioned legislation. The current notion that many people in the tech world have, which roughly states that what determines whether something is kosher is whether it's technically possible to accomplish, is something that needs to change, instead of things just staying a permanent Wild West forever.
There's also an old phrase that putting locks on your doors doesn't actually stop a determined attacker, but that it's okay because they're not meant to—that they're meant to "keep honest people honest". It's a principle that applies here.
No, there are few to no actual privacy improvements over centralized systems.
Perhaps even functional regression: what, are you going to run a hash blocklist across all nodes? Like spamhaus? Is there logging or user accounting? Is anything chain of custody admissable, or are we actually talking about privacy and liberty here?
Is everything just marked, "not for unlimited distribution"? And we dwpend upon there not being bad actors?
Real costs are very different with just friendly early adopters.
Cryptographically signing posts (with LD-Signatures) may help with integrity, but that can be done with centralized systems and does nothing to help with confidentiality.
What about availability? Is it a trivially-DOS'able system?
Governments spurred the rise of solar power
I can't read the article, but I think evidence like this is important when it comes to the whole idea of government subsidises impacting on free markets. The free market has become a bit of a religion for some (you can see in the comments here), and there's this staunch divide between those that believe the free market will always come up with a humanitarian solution, to those that believe the government need to push things for it to happen.
My FIL was head of a large coal plant in the UK, and is very critical of renewable energies, their cost, the impact on the fossil fuel industry etc... It simply isn't possible to have a conversation with him about global warming - he will simultaneously argue it isn't happening and it's natural and not caused by us. He might be an extreme example, but there is general scepticism of government subsidies here.
I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.
I always find the free market vs government arguments a false dichotomy. Even the free-est markets require a whole host of government services: regulation, standards setting, contracts enforcement, antifraud measures provision and infrastructure to name but a few. People only cry free market when they don't like a particular government activity.
That coal plant relies on infrastructure to get its coal. It needs fair utility prices to deliver its power to customers. It needs reliable (abuse free) markets to sell the power on. It needs voltage and frequency/time standards to access the network. It needs contract enforcement to actually get paid by its customers. It needs insurance and educated workers and a CEO who won't embezzle.
All provided by government, all welcomed by industry. But suddenly government has no place in free markets when it comes to CO2.
Should we prefer penalties or incentives in order to use predictable markets for the change we need?
That depends on whether you want power to be cheaper or more expensive. Cheaper is nice but you'll pay for it taxes etc. Expensive is painful at the point of consumption but encourages efficiency. It's a strategic and political decision and depends on a nations needs and objectives...
> I'd love to see a study where researchers take things that are seen as good/important/essential to modern life and measure the amount of public/government sponsorship that helped bring it about.
Essential technology investment of US tax dollars?
NASA spinoff technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
NSF, DARPA, IARPA, In-Q-Tel, ARPA-e (2009)
List of emerging technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies
Termux no longer updated on Google Play
The GitHub discussion is significantly more informative and carries a lot of thinking behind the changes: https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072
IMO a better link than a short paragraph on Wiki.
Note that there are 297 hidden items in that issue so you have to click "Load more..." ceil(297/60) times to read all of the comments about how APK packaging is soon necessary for latest Android devices so the termux package manager can't just dump executable binaries wherever.
FWIU:
- Android Q+ disallows exec() on anything in $HOME, which is where termux installed binaries that may have been writeable by the executing user.
- Binaries installed from APKs can be exec()'d, so termux must keep APK repacks rebuilt and uploaded to a play store.
- Termux shouldn't be installed from Google Play anymore: you should install termux from the F-Droid APK package repos, and it will install APKs instead of what it was doing.
- Compiling to WASM with e.g. emscripten or WASI was one considered alternative. "Emscripten & WASI & POSIX" https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/9479
What about development on-the-device?
- It seems C compiled with clang on the device wouldn't be executable? (If it was, that would be a way around the restriction: distribute packages as source, like the good old days)
> offer users the option of generating an apk wrapping their native code in a usable way. https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/1072#issuecommen...
This seems a promising solution: compile from source, create an apk, install - your custom distribution! For popular collections of packages, a pre-built apk.
- Java might be explicitly blocked, being a system language for android, even though its byecode is interpeted and not exec()ed.
- Other interpreted languages should be OK e.g. python
> > offer users the option of generating an apk wrapping their native code in a usable way.
> This seems a promising solution: compile from source, create an apk, install - your custom distribution! For popular collections of packages, a pre-built apk.
FPM could probably generate APKs in addition to the source archive and package types that it already supports.
The conda-forge package CI flow is excellent. There's a bot that sends a Pull Request to update the version number in the conda package feedstock meta.yml when it detects that e.g. there's a new version of the source package on e.g. PyPI. When a PR is merged, conda-forge builds on Win/Mac/Lin and publishes the package to the conda-forge package channel (`conda install -y -c conda-forge jupyterlab pandas`)
The Fedora GitOps package workflow is great too, but bugzilla isn't Markdown by default.
Keeping those APKs updated and rebuilt is work.
Ask HN: What should go in an Excel-to-Python equivalent of a couch-to-5k?
Yesterday, my co-founder published a blog about her experiences Ditching Excel for Python in her job as a Reinsurance Analyst [0].
One of the responses on reddit [1] asked what they should do, "Step 1 day 1," if having read Amy's post they were convinced to try and begin the long journey from tangled Excel/Access spaghetti.
My (flippant) reaction to a friend that brought the comment to my attention was unhelpful; "Step 1 day 1, quit." So he has challenged me to write eight helpful blog posts during the remainder of my Garden Leave.
What should go in them?
[0] https://amypeniston.com/ditching-excel-for-python/
How to write functions in JS / VB script and call them from a cell expression.
How to name variables something other than AB3.
How to use physical units and datatypes. (How to specify XSD datatype URIs that map to native primitives in an additional frozen header row. e.g. py-moneyed and Pint & NumPy ufuncs)
How transitive sort works (is there a tsort to determine what to calculate first (and whether there are cycles) on every modification event?)
Which Jupyter platforms do and don't support interactive charts with e.g. ipywidgets?
pandas.df.plot(kind=) (matplotlib), seaborne (what are the calculated parameters of this chart?), holoviews, plotly, altair
Reproducibility w/ repo2docker / BinderHub:
pip freeze > constraints.txt
cp constraints.txt requirements.txt
conda env export --from-historyAlso,
When is it better to have code in a notebook instead of in a module?
How to export notebook cells to a module with nbdev
How to write tests to assert the quality of the code and the model: @pytest.mark.parametrize, pytest-notebook, jupyter-pytest-2, pytest-jupyter
When is it appropriate to parametrized a notebook with e.g. papermill?
How to handle concurrency: dask.distributed + dask-labextension, ipyparallel
Interesting, your suggestion is that the first thing to do is to learn how to make functions and variable names within excel?
Yeah if you port it to functions and verify that you haven't broken anything, you could then easily port to Python functions that you could call from Excel with an add-on that everyone that opens the sheet needs to have installed; but everyone that opens a sheet that calls Python must have that same extension (and all python package dependencies) installed, too
>My (flippant) reaction to a friend that brought the comment to my attention was unhelpful; "Step 1 day 1, quit." So he has challenged me to write eight helpful blog posts during the remainder of my Garden Leave.
One way to do it would be to do impedance matching: maximizing usefulness by bringing Python to the universe the person who asked the question lives in: Excel, Word, PDF, email.
This means "Automate the Boring Stuff"[0] to ease into programming with something specific to do that is relevant and useful right off the bat for manipulating files, spreadsheets, PDF documents, etc.
Openpyxl[1] for playing more with Excel files, and basically searching "Excel Python" on the internet for more use cases.
Python-docx[2] for playing with Word documents, extracting content from tables, etc.
PdfPlumber[3] for playing with PDFs. Sometimes you have data in .pptx files, and you can use LibreOffice to convert all of them to PDFs because you hate the pptx format:
libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf *.pptx
- [0]: https://nostarch.com/automatestuff2
- [1]: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
- [2]: https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Using openpyxl to extract data from exist excel workbooks and other documents would seem like a good place to start.
I suspect many companies use excel workbooks as "forms" with lots of data at the same cell in multiple workbooks.
> I suspect many companies use excel workbooks as "forms" with lots of data at the same cell in multiple workbooks.
Downstream data quality costs can be minimized with data normalized schema and data collection process controls like forms-based data validation.
There are established UI/UX design patterns for data validation of user-supplied data: accessible [web] forms with tab-ordered input fields and specific per-input feedback with accessible HTML5 and ARIA. IIUC, Firefox now supports PDF forms, too?
Why would we move from a spreadsheet to an actual database?
Data integrity:
Referential integrity (making sure that record keys actually point to something when creating, updating, or deleting),
Columnar datatypes (float, decimal, USD, complex fraction),
Access controls (auth(z): authentication and authorization),
Auditing (what was the value before and after that) and Disaster Recovery,
Organizationally-unified schema development and corresponding validation.
Repeatability / Reproducibility: can you replay the steps needed to build the whole sheet? What parameters were entered and how to we script that par so that we can easily assess the relations between the terms of the argument presented?
Scientists turn CO2 into jet fuel
Link to the article in question: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20214-z
They call it 'renewable' yet use Iron as a catalyst. I'm not a chemist - how is that renewable?
Yao, B., Xiao, T., Makgae, O.A. et al. "Transforming carbon dioxide into jet fuel using an organic combustion-synthesized Fe-Mn-K catalyst." Nat Commun 11, 6395 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20214-z
Synthetic biology can do it better. Fix CO2 by growing sugar cane, turn sugar into jet fuel with genetically engineered yeast.
https://www.total.com/media/news/press-releases/total-and-am...
Still not commercially viable, but much closer to it than the linked process.
That approach requires lots of land, water, and time. Nothing wrong with that, but much of the funding for CO2->jet fuel research comes from the military, which wants to be able to create liquid fuel quickly from CO2 in the atmosphere and they don't care how inefficient it is. Military customers are typically not very interested in processes that require running a farm.
The military also spends a lot of time turning jet fuel into electricity, because the former is energy-dense, easy to store, easy to transport. And they need electricity in lots of places without a grid.
Where would the reverse be useful? Somehow you have unlimited electricity but no fuel, and you have time and space to run a chemical refinery? (And isn't carbon capture from the atmosphere likely to require farm-scale infrastructure anyway?)
You cannot run aircraft on electricity; liquid fuel is the only option. The military is keenly interested in being able to refuel aircraft in situations where liquid fuel shipments might be denied or unavailable for some reason.
You can run aircraft on electricity.
Locomotives run on electrical energy produced by diesel generators (because electric motors are more energy efficient), for example.
The limits are the cost and weight of the batteries and the charge time.
You can't in any practical sense. Locomotives don't have a problem carrying the weight of a diesel engine plus a generator; in fact the extra weight works in their favor.
If you tried that trick with an airplane it would never get off the ground. Locomotives use this system not for efficiency but because they need the low-end torque electric motors provide. (If they only needed efficiency they'd just drive the wheels with the diesel engine directly.) Airplanes don't need torque; they need power.
You can run an airplane on batteries but only for a few minutes with modern battery technology. Practical battery-powered aircraft for military applications are not going to happen any time soon. We might see battery-powered air taxis soon but those are not even close to meeting military requirements for fighters, transports, etc.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft :
> [For] large passenger aircraft, an improvement of the energy density by a factor 20 compared to li-ion batteries would be required
The time it takes to surpass this energy density threshold is affected by battery tech investments; which had been comparatively paltry in terms of defense spending. Trillions on batteries would've been a much better investment; with ROI.
Sadly, some folks in defense still can't understand why non-oil investments in battery tech are best for all.
There are multiple electric trainer aircraft with flight times over an hour and quite a few more in development.
Jet engines are terribly inefficient (30-50% efficient) compared to electric motors.
Show HN: Stork: A customizable, WASM-powered full-text search plugin for the web
OP - congratulations on shipping! WASM-powered search caught my eye.
Looks like the search index is downloaded and used locally in the browser, so this is as fast as search can get. One trade-off though is that you're limited to relatively small datasets. While this shouldn't be an issue for small-medium static sites, an index that needs to be downloaded over the wire will affect your page performance for larger sites / datasets.
In those cases, you'd want to use a dedicated search server like Algolia or its open source alternative Typesense [1]. Both of them store the index server-side and only return the relevant records that are searched for.
For eg: you'd probably not want to download 2M records over the wire to search through them locally [2]. You'd be better off storing the index server-side.
[1] https://github.com/typesense/typesense (shameless plug)
Just a quick non-thought-through idea but would it be possible to build an index in a way that allows clients to download only parts of it based on what they search? I.e. the search client normalizes the query in some way and then requests only the relevant index pages. The index would probably be a lot larger on the server but if disk space is not an issue...?
(Though at some point you have to ask yourself what the benefits of such an approach are compared to a search server.)
Merkle Search Trees: Efficient State-Based CRDTs in Open Networks https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02303490/document
Peer-to-Peer Ordered Search Indexes https://0fps.net/2020/12/19/peer-to-peer-ordered-search-inde... (which adds useful context about the above)
Sorry for just dropping these links, I should already be asleep :)
> Merkle Search Trees: Efficient State-Based CRDTs in Open Networks https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02303490/document
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7160577141569533185... ... "Merkle Hash Grids Instead of Merkle Trees" (2020) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13503894708682701...
Browser-side "Blockchain Certificate Transparency" applications need to support at least exact key lookup by domain/SAN and then also by cert fingerprint value; but the whole CT chain with every cert issue and revocation event is impractically large in terms of disk space.
https://github.com/amark/gun#history may also be practically useful.
Upptime – GitHub-powered open-source uptime monitor and status page
Maker here, I made Upptime as a way to scratch my own itch... I wanted a nice status page for Koj (https://status.koj.co) and was previously using Uptime Robot which didn't allow much customization to the website.
It started with the idea of using GitHub issues for incident reports and using the GitHub API to populate the status page. The obvious next step was opening the issues automatically, so the uptime monitor was born. I love using GitHub Actions in interesting ways (https://github.blog/2020-08-13-github-actions-karuna/) and have made it a large part of my toolkit!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25557032 mentions "~3000 minutes per month". GitLab's new pricing structure: [(runner_minutes, usd_per_month), (400, $0), (2_000, $4), (10_000, $19), (50_000, $99)]
You can run a self-hosted GitHub or GitLab Runner with your own resources: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/host...
GitLab [Runner] also runs tasks on cron schedules.
The process invocation overhead for CI is greater than for a typical metrics collection process like a nagios check or a memory-resident daemon like collectd with the curl plugin and the "Write HTTP" plugin (if you're not into using a space and time efficient timeseries database for metrics storage)
An open source project with a $5/mo VPS could run collectd in a container with a config file far far more energy efficiently than this approach.
Collectd curl statistics: https://collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.conf.5....
Collect list of plugins: https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Table_of_Plugins
Is there a good way to do {DNS, curl HTTP, curl JSON} stats with Prometheus (instead of e.g. collectd as a minimal approach)?
Show HN: Simple-graph – a graph database in SQLite
I wonder if there are ways, in SQLite, to build indices for s,p,o/s,p/p,o/ and maybe more subtle ones... That would be uber nice, given the fact that most graph databases have their own indexing strategies, and you cannot craft your own.
rdflib-sqlalchemy is a SQLAlchemy rdflib graph store backend: https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib-sqlalchemy
It also persists namespace mappings so that e.g. schema:Thing expands to http://schema.org/Thing
The table schema and indices are defined in rdflib_sqlalchemy/tables.py: https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib-sqlalchemy/blob/develop/rdf...
You can execute SPARQL queries against SQL, but most native triplestores will have a better query plan and/or better performance.
Apache Rya, for example:
> indexes SPO, POS, and OSP.
Thanks for your comment. I use rdflib frequently but have never tried the SQLAlchemy back end. Now I will. That said, Jena or Fuseki, or the commercial RDF stores like GraphDB, Stardog, and Allegrograph are so much more efficient.
In CPython, types implemented in C are part of the type tree
The docs should have coverage on this:
Python/C API Reference Manual: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/index.html
Python/C API Reference Manual » Object Implementation Support > Type Objects: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/typeobj.html
CPython Devguide > Exploring Python Internals > Additional References: https://devguide.python.org/exploring/
Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier that takes 30s to assemble
From "Better Box Fan Air Purifier" https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-a... :
> Air purifiers can be expensive and you've probably seen articles recommending to just put a 20" x 20" x 1" furnace filter on a cheap 20" box fan and POOF! instant cleaner air for not a lot of money. It really does clean the air pretty cheap.
> There's a problem with this though. These fans weren't designed to be run with a filter. The filter will restrict air flow which will put a higher strain on the motor causing it to use more electricity and in worse cases could be a fire hazard. The higher the MERV rating (cleaning efficiency) of the filter the more stress it will put on the fan.
> Don't worry! You can still have your cheap air purifier as long as the filter area is increased to decrease the effect of air resistance. Instead of using one 20x20x1 filter we'll use two 20x25x1 filters which increases the filter surface area over 250%. It's a little more expensive because you're using two filters instead of one but the increased filter surface area also helps the filter last longer before it gets clogged up and we're saving on energy use compared to a single filter.
> There's a problem with this though. These fans weren't designed to be run with a filter. The filter will restrict air flow which will put a higher strain on the motor causing it to use more electricity and in worse cases could be a fire hazard. The higher the MERV rating (cleaning efficiency) of the filter the more stress it will put on the fan.
I'm fairly certain the opposite is true. In fact, most rowing machines work on this principle. The easiest setting is the one where the fan is as closed off as possible because it's pulling a vacuum. Less air, less resistance, easier to row / less power required to spin the fan. If anything, fans should draw less current with air flow on the inlet side restricted.
A. Putting two [larger] filters in a 'V' with cardboard to fill the top and bottom pulls the same amount of air through a larger area of filters
B. pulling the same volume of air through greater surface area results in greater pressure between the filter and fan than one filter directly affixed to the fan
C. The lower air pressure / "suction" due to an obstructed intake causes an electric fan motor to fail more quickly.
D. Increasing the air pressure that the motor is in reduces the failure rate?
Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys
This makes absolutely no sense and has no relation to any economic variables. Goodreads isn’t some struggling self-funded startup — it’s owned by Amazon.com. The acquisition was a deal that should have never been approved, if the Obama administration had been anything beyond completely impotent at protecting us from monopoly games:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/02/amazon-purchas...
I would like to understand the true strategic interest behind this. Is Amazon simply penny-pinching now that they’ve successfully obliterated the market for both new and used books online? There’s way more to this story than appears on the surface.
It's not mentioned in the article but Amazon had disabled their affiliate link program for Goodreads ahead of this announcement, which cut off a major source of their revenue for them, and forced them to sell. They had no choice.
The strategic reason for Amazon is obvious. As someone else mentioned, Amazon doesn't want Goodreads data to be used to add value to their competitors' offerings.
Speaking as a developer who tried to build on top of Goodreads API, I also want to add that this was a long time coming. The API had been neglected for some time. And some of the most interesting datasets weren't even made available through the API.
Apparently Amazon’s Kindle lost the ability to share progress on Goodreads in the last week as well.
I guess the writings on the wall...
Turing Tumble Simulator
(Turing Tumble is a (fun) marble-powered computer game.)
Python Pip 20.3 Released with new resolver
If anyone hasn't seen it, now is a good time to look at https://python-poetry.org/ It is rapidly becoming _the_ package manager to use. I've used it in a bunch of personal and professional projects with zero issues. It's been rock solid so far, and I'm definitely a massive fan.
I occasionally ask our principle / sr. Python engineers about this, and their response is always, "These things come and go, virtualenv/wrappers + pip + requirements.txt works fine - no need to look at anything else."
We've got about 15 repos, with the largest repo containing about 1575 files and 34MBytes of .py source, 14 current developers (with about 40 over the last 10 years) - and they really are quite proficient, but haven't demonstrated any interest at looking at anything outside pip/virtualenv.
Is there a reason to look at poetry if you've got the pip/virtualenv combination working fine?
People who use poetry seem to love it - so I'm interested in whether it provides any new abilities / flexibility that pip doesn't.
beware of zealot geeks bearing gifts. if your environment is currently working fine and you are only interested in running one version of python and perhaps experimenting with a later one then venv + pip is all you need, with some wrapper scripts as you say to make it ergonomic (to set the PYTHON* environment variables for your project, for example)
The main reason I use Poetry is for its lockfile support. I've written about why lockfiles are good here: https://myers.io/2019/01/13/what-is-the-purpose-of-a-lock-fi...
Pip supports constraints files. https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/user_guide/#constraints-files :
> Constraints files are requirements files that only control which version of a requirement is installed, not whether it is installed or not. Their syntax and contents is nearly identical to Requirements Files. There is one key difference: Including a package in a constraints file does not trigger installation of the package.
> Use a constraints file like so:
python -m pip install -c constraints.txtWhat does that command do? Does it install dependencies, or simply verify the versions of the installed dependencies?
It just gives you an error:
ERROR: You must give at least one requirement to install (see "pip help install")
Your package manager should be boring, extremely backward and forward compatible, and never broken. Experience has shown this not to be true for python. Several times over the years i’ve found myself, pinning, upgrading, downgrading, or otherwise juggling versions of setuptools and pip in order to work around some bug. Historically I have had far more problems with the machinery to install python packages I have had with all of the other python packages being installed combined, and that is absurd.
Convolution Is Fancy Multiplication
FWIW, (bounded) Conway's Game of Life can be efficiently implemented as a convolution of the board state: https://gist.github.com/mikelane/89c580b7764f04cf73b32bf4e94...
How to better ventilate your home
I recently purchased a home and spent some time improving ventilation in it this year. This is a home in Minneapolis, so just "opening a window" is not an option, as it would be too cold in the winter and dramatically reduce energy efficiency. Its effectiveness also changes based on factors like the wind, and the temperature difference between inside and out.
The general strategy for doing this right now with existing homes is to insulate your home as well as possible for energy efficiency, then install a continuous ventilation fan. This is essentially a bathroom fan, except that it runs all the time at a constant low speed, helping to circulate the air through and out your house by "pulling" a designed amount of air through the cracks.
I didn't want to punch a new hole in the house just to do this, and already had a bathroom fan installed, so as a hack I just turned it into a whole house ventilation fan with this: https://www.aircycler.com/pages/smartexhaust
Basically you calculate how much CFM you need per hour based on the square footage of your house, and then you set it on the fan control. It still acts like a bathroom fan, except every hour it also runs for a set period of time (in my case, about 12 minutes).
The standard for this is ASHRAE 62.2. Use this to calculate the CFM for code: https://homes.lbl.gov/ventilate-right/step-3-whole-building-...
Then the formula for calculating the fan run time is on this sheet: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0221/7316/files/AC_DOC_7_0...
And presto, you have a ventilation system without having to do a lot of work. Do _not_ try this with a crappy, rusty old bathroom fan - clean or replace the motor first, and for extra credit, use an arc fault circuit interrupter on the breaker so if the motor fails it will blow the fuse instead of potentially causing a fire.
Note: This is really just to manage general air quality and VOCs. If you want to specifically make ventilation for COVID-19, that's a different problem. They focus on Air Changes per Hour (ACH), and a cubic feet calculation is used rather than square feet. There's no "recommended amount" of ACH for managing COVID-19. You're likely improving the situation by increasing it, but I wouldn't start inviting people over after you did it. ACH is very high in ICUs but staff are still getting sick there.
RE Humidity - ideal range varies based on region and outside temperature, but this chart roughly shows it: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/mPz-jGdLpnPGgvWR3Egf...
I have an on-furnace humidifier controlled by an ecobee for the winter, it's a huge quality of life improvement if you live in cold climates, but make sure to set it to "frost control" otherwise it won't lower the humidity based on the outside air and you can get mold in your walls. For summer, a standard house A/C combined with continuous ventilation should be sufficient to bring down humidity levels.
Finally, the "correct" air ventilation is a moving target with trade-offs and concerns of the moment. It was higher in 1925 (30cfm/person) to try to prevent tuberculosis and infectious diseases, then was lowered to 5cfm/person in the 70s during the energy crisis, and is currently at 15cfm/person. I imagine COVID-19 could make us re-consider the current recommendations. https://homes.lbl.gov/ventilate-right/ashrae-standard-622
I'm in an older home that leaks a sieve but has central air. Would turning on that house fan to circulate without running the AC accomplish the same thing? Also, do any smart thermostats allow this sort of thing to be automated?
"Fan control with a Nest thermostat" https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9296419?hl=en
Looks like there could be: (1) an every hour for n minutes schedule; (2) an option to run the fan with the thermostat off; (3) an option to shut off the fan when everyone is gone
Quantum-computing pioneer Peter Shor warns of complacency over Internet security
If an organization has a 5 year refresh cycle (~time to implement a new IT system), and there exists a quantum computer with a sufficient number of error-corrected qubits by 2027 [1], an organization/industry has 5 years from 2022 to go quantum-resistant: replace their existing solution with quantum-resistant algos (and, in some cases, a DLT with a coherent pan-industry API) and/or double their RSA and ECDSA key sizes.
[1] "Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them (ECDSA, SHA256)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15907523
Which DLT/blockchains without PKI (or DNS) will implement the algorithms selected from the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) round 3 candidate algorithms? https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
CERN Online introductory lectures on quantum computing from 6 November
This is probably a dumb question but are there any data sciencey or tensorflowy things that can be done faster on a quantum computer?
There are some basic linear algebra subroutines (Matrix inversion, finding eigenvalues & eigenvectors) that can be performed with an exponential speedup on a quantum computer in theory, that's why there is so much interest in Quantum Machine Learning. If you are asking about the current hardware level, then no, current quantum computers can not solve any practical problem faster than a classical computer.
In theory classical computers are also not limited to have better solutions to problems where quantum computers claim superiority like prime factorisation or like Tang's quantum inspired classical algorithm that beats HHL for low rank matrices.
> There are some basic linear algebra subroutines (Matrix inversion, finding eigenvalues & eigenvectors) that can be performed with an exponential speedup on a quantum computer in theory
Eh... those particular subroutines have polynomial time algorithms already on a classical computer.
You can't exponentially speed up something that's polynomial time already.
https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/ lists algorithms, speedups, and descriptions.
That's a great list, thanks!
(Though for the benefit of readers here, the list doesn't include any "basic linear algebra subroutines (Matrix inversion, finding eigenvalues & eigenvectors)").
A Manim Code Template
The demo video looks cool. It's maybe not obvious that there's a link to the code-video-generator (which is built on manim by 3blue1brown) demo video in the README: https://youtu.be/Jn7ZJ-OAM1g
Startup Financial Modeling: What is a Financial Model? (2016)
https://www.causal.app/ has free business model templates: SaaS (Foresight), eCommerce (https://foresight.is/), Startup Runway, Buy/Rent, Ads Calculator
The article explicitly, repeatedly says templates are a bad idea. If you disagree, it'd be interesting to see your reasoning, rather than links to free templates.
We'd do better to find a list of business modeling books and tools.
And then take a look at integrating actual data sources; hopefully some quantitative with APIs.
Uncertainties supports mean±"error" w/ "error propagation": https://pypi.org/project/uncertainties/
Sliders etc can be done in Jupyter notebooks with e.g. ipywidgets: https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
At what grade level do presidential candidates debate?
Intelligence does not imply superior moral, ethical, or rational judgement.
Incomplexity of speech does not imply lack of intelligence.
Here's the section on Simple English in Simple English Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Simple_Eng...
Imagine being reprimanded for use of complex words and statistical terms in an evidence-based policy discussion in a boardroom. Imagine someone applying to be CEO, President, or Chairman of the Board and showing up without a laptop, any charts, or any data.
Topicality!
Perhaps there is a better game for assessing competency to practice evidence-based policy.
This commenter effectively refutes the claim that Fleisch-Kincaid is a useful metric for assessing the grade-level of interpretively-punctuated spoken language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24807610
Like I said, from "Ask HN: Recommendations for online essay grading systems?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22921064 :
> Who else remembers using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level metric in Word to evaluate school essays? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
> Imagine my surprise when I learned that this metric is not one that was created for authors to maximize: reading ease for the widest audience is not an objective in some deparments, but a requirement.
> What metrics do and should online essay grading systems present? As continuous feedback to authors, or as final judgement?
That being said, disrespectful little b will not be tolerated or venerated by the other half of the curve.
ElectricityMap – Live CO₂ emissions of electricity production and consumption
What's going on in Queensland, Australia? "793g Carbon intensity" seems insanely high, especially as compared with Norway/France/Sweden (at 24-41g carbon intensity).
Does anyone have insight into this? I've never pictured Australia as a big contributor to pollution.
Good observation. I was curious, and it looks like the parser code to retrieve the data is open source; so here's the relevant module for Australia:
https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/24ea2...
The production mix (energy generation by source) source URL is listed on L326.
Opening the dataset in LibreOffice Calc, filtering by Region = QLD1, filtering for Current Output > 0, and sorting by Current Output descending does seem to show that the vast bulk of production reported has fuel source descriptor 'Black Coal'.
If that's a bug in the reported data or source, hopefully the ElectricityMap team can jump in to take a look. The data initially seems legit, from searching for some of the power stations listed.
Edit / addendum: worth searching for Australia in the project's GitHub issues too; there's some existing (although not directly related) investigation & validation work ongoing for that module
Also - home solar penetration in QLD is the highest in Australia. Is that not factored in to the equation? It doesn't look that way given 0% renewables shown.
This website is pulling information from public sources, so it can only show public generation & consumption information.
If someone is running a grid-tied solar system, outbound energy might be accounted for in these statistics, but it won't show any immediate consumption of that solar generation by the property, nor will it show any battery storage, it's only capable of showing what goes through the energy meter.
+1. California has substantial rooftop solar (11 Gwh peak) behind the meter, which isn’t shown in these graphs.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/04/15/californias-solar-pow...
How would behind the meter electricity consumption change the reported amount of CO2 emitted by other electricity production sources?
The map is intended to show the emissions intensity of electricity so if you miss a bunch of electricity from distributed generation you will over-estimate the intensity.
Man that was a dumb question. Thanks for clarifying.
So we'd need electric utility companies to share the live data of how many kwh of solar and wind people are selling back to the grid in order to get an accurate regional comparison of real-time carbon intensity?
FWIU, they're already parsing the EIA data; but it's significantly more delayed than the max 2 hour delay specified by ElectricityMap.
Here's the parser for the current data from EIA: https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/maste...
Should the EIA (1) source, aggregate, cache, and make more real-time data available; and (2) create a new data item for behind the meter kwh from e.g. residential wind and solar?
(Edit) "Does EIA publish data on peak or hourly electricity generation, demand, and prices?" https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=100&t=3
> Hourly Electric Grid Monitor is a redesigned and enhanced version of the U.S. Electric System Operating Data tool. It incorporates two new data elements: hourly electricity generation by types of energy/fuel source and hourly sub-regional demand for certain balancing authorities in the Lower 48 states.
> [...]
> EIA does not publish hourly electricity price data, but it does publish wholesale electricity market information including daily volumes, high and low prices, and weighted-average prices on a biweekly basis.
AFAIU, retail intraday rates aren't yet really a thing in the US; but some countries in Europe do have intraday rates (which create incentives for the grid scale energy storage necessary for wide-scale rollout of renewables).
(Edit) "Introduction to the World of Electricity Trading" https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042115/under... :
> Energy prices are influenced by a variety of factors that affect the supply and demand equilibrium. On the demand side, commonly referred to as a load, the main factors are economic activity, weather, and general efficiency of consumption. On the supply side, commonly referred to as generation, fuel prices and availability, construction costs and the fixed costs are the main drivers of the price of energy. There's a number of physical factors between supply and demand that affect the actual clearing price of electricity. Most of these factors are related to the transmission grid, the network of high voltage power lines and substations that ensure the safe and reliable transport of electricity from its generation to its consumption.
Which customers (e.g. data centers, mining firms) would take advantage of retail intraday rates?
How does cost and availability of storage affect the equilibrium price of electricity?
>So we'd need electric utility companies to share the live data of how many kwh of solar and wind people are selling back to the grid in order to get an accurate regional comparison of real-time carbon intensity?
You actually need production numbers for what's used "behind the meter" which by its nature is not directly available live or otherwise and has to be estimated.
>Which customers (e.g. data centers, mining firms) would take advantage of retail intraday rates?
Loads! In the UK you can get half-hourly priced electricity even at a domestic level (with a smart meter) and if you have loads that can be be re-scheduled (mainly EV charging but if you had an electric storage heater that would work as ell) you can save quite a lot of money.
Heavy industrial users definitely move usage around both to avoid expensive wholesale charges but also to reduce their transmission connection charges which (in the UK) are based on their usage during the most congested periods of the year. Water companies will vary pump operations for this reason and water pumping and treatment alone is 2% of electricity use.
Data centers definitely pay on a half-hourly settled basis but tend not to shift their workloads around to take advantage, some data centers will run their cooling systems in such a way as to reduce usage during the most expensive few half hours though. I have heard that larger users like Amazon, FB, Google, will automatically load balance between global centers to reduce electricity bills and carbon footprint.
> how many kwh of solar and wind people are selling back
Not just selling back. Producing - and then either using or selling.
This USA data seems kind of strange to me. For instance my home state, Kansas, we are fourth in the nation for installed wind capacity, supplying 41% of our energy demand. Our sole nuclear power plant provides an 18% base load. 33% is coal and the rest random crap. We're very population sparse and low population in general. Yet in other areas of the country that are strictly coal and natural gas fired, with a greater population density and higher total population, they're less turd colored. I'm guessing this is a strange interaction between renewable availability or it just might be a lack of available data.
From https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib#data-sourc... :
> Here are some of the ways you can contribute:
> Building a new parser, Fixing a broken parser, Changes to the frontend, Find data sources, Verify data sources, Translating electricitymap.org, Updating region capacities
I sent a few tweets and emails about the data in this region but nothing happened here either
[deleted]
Bash Error Handling
From https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1312413117436104705 :
> TIL that you can use the "DEBUG" trap to step through a bash script line by line
trap '(read -p "[$BASH_SOURCE:$LINENO] $BASH_COMMAND?")' DEBUG
>> you can also customize the prompt with set -x
export PS4='+(${BASH_SOURCE}:${LINENO}) '
set -x
A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups
> For consumer companies, there are only three growth “lanes” that comprise the majority of new customer acquisition:
> 1. Performance marketing (e.g. Facebook and Google ads)
> 2. Virality (e.g. word-of-mouth, referrals, invites)
> 3. Content (e.g. SEO, YouTube)
> There are two additional lanes (sales and partnerships) which we won't cover in this post because they are rarely effective in consumer businesses. And there are other tactics to boost customer acquisition (e.g PR, brand marketing), but the lanes outlined above are the only reliable paths for long-term and sustainable business growth.
Marketing calls those "channels". I don't think they're exclusive categories: a startup's YouTube videos could be supporting a viral marketing campaign, for example; ads aren't the only strategy for (targeted) social media marketing; if the "ask" / desired behavior upon receiving the message is to share the brand, is that "viral"?
What about Super Bowel commercials?
Traditional marketing: press releases, (linked-citation-free) news wires, quasi-paid interviews, "news program" appearances, product placement.
"Growth hacking": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking
Gathering all open and sustainable technology projects
Great list! https://github.com/protontypes/awesome-sustainable-technolog...
"Earth" topic label: https://github.com/topics/earth
Though there are unfortunately zero (0,) results for "sustainability-report[s,ing]", it may be useful to have a heading: https://github.com/topics/sustainability-reporting ... GRI Reporting Standards & XBRL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Reporting_Initiative , Sustainability Cloud, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_reporting
TIL about the "SWEET" (Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology) Ontologies: https://github.com/ESIPFed/sweet
SunPy: https://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/generated/gallery/index.htm...
Jupyter Notebooks Gallery
This is not a valid Show HN, so we've taken that out of the title. Please see the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Note the word 'lists'.
Lists tend not to make good HN submissions because the only thing one can really discuss about them is the lowest common denominator (or greatest common factor?) of the list elements. It would be better to pick one of the most interesting elements and submit that instead.
HN is itself a list, and a pointer to a pointer to a pointer is too much indirection.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=denominator%20list%20by:dang&d...
Jupyter/Jupyter > Wiki > "A gallery of interesting Jupyter Notebooks" lists hundreds of notebooks: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes...
The mybinder.org Grafana dashboard lists the most popular notebook repos in the last hour: https://grafana.mybinder.org/
Jupyter/Nbviewer > FAQ > "How do you choose the notebooks featured on the nbviewer.jupyter.org homepage?" :
> We originally selected notebooks that we found and liked. We are currently soliciting links to refresh the home page using a Google Form. You may also open an issue with your suggestion.
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/faq#how-do-you-choose-the-noteb...
Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd6AlVvC7KagENypGTc...
Here's the Nbviewer source code. AMP (And https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle / Book / CreativeWork metadata) could be useful. https://github.com/jupyter/nbviewer
Jupyter notebooks are almost a huge step forward for programming. The instant feedback, saving of partial program state, and visualizations mixed in are amazing and fun to work with. The fact that it's taking place in a browser, you don't have modal editing with Vim, you don't get plugin support (like MyPy), and you don't have intellisense is a huge step backwards.
I'm hoping that someone addresses these issues, I know VSCode is trying, and Scala "Metals" worksheets are another similar concept (though different, it puts variable values in comments next to code as you update the code).
I feel like all of these are a step closer than what the Lighttable/Eve teams were shooting for, but not quite the next generation way of coding that it could be.
I'm a huge fan of rmarkdown since it addresses many of these shortcomings by way of being much simpler than jupyter notebooks. The files are simply text files, and you can write python too if you like, they aren't just for R.
NestedText, a nice alternative to JSON, YAML, TOML
So, this is basically YAML, "but better". I can repeat once more that "easily understood and used by both programmers and non-programmers" is unapologetically stupid concept that can never succeed. So I see how all of this will sound all too familiar to anybody with a little experience, which makes them to automatically dismiss this YAYAML.
But YAML is really quite complicated, and JSON (which shouldn't be used for config files at all) and TOML (which I love and wish it would gain more popularity) aren't exactly alternatives to YAML. So, I would be actually totally ok with "YAML, but better", as a way to deprecate YAML.
Now, it is clear from the start that this cannot deprecate YAML, because it doesn't even have booleans and numbers. But, surprisingly, I can accept this as well: ok, let's just assume that being good at dealing with strings may be enough.
The problem is, it isn't clear at all from the docs, if this is better than YAML at anything. It raises dozens of questions. I'll start with the most basic ones (using [] as a wrapper/delimiter): how do I represent values [ a], [a ], ["a"] and [""] in this file format?
What kind of values are [<whitespace>a] and [a<whitespace>] supposed to be? They look like typical YAML syntax traps to me.
Why should JSON never be used for configuration? It is sufficient for declaratively expressing anything I have encountered. Do we really need references or other stuff from YAML? For configuration this seems unnessecary, provided that the program, which interprets the result of parsing the JSON is well written.
JSON lacks comments and will fail for a missing or extra comma, so it's not great for configuration written by humans.
You can use HJSON which is the json with comments. It's fully compatible with json so easy to introduce into anything that does json. https://hjson.github.io/
JSON5 also supports comments and multiline strings with `\`-escaped newlines: https://json5.org/
Triple-quoted multiline strings like HJSON would be great, too.
From "The description of YAML in the README is inaccurate" https://github.com/KenKundert/nestedtext/issues/10 :
> I will mention something else. The section about the "Norway problem" is not quite accurate. Some YAML loaders do in fact load no as false. These are usually YAML 1.1 loaders. YAML 1.2's default schema is the same as JSON's (only true, false, 'null and numbers are non-strings).
> Any YAML loader is free to use any schema it wants. That is, no loader is required to to load no as false. Good loaders should support multiple schemas and custom schemas. The Norway problem isn't technically a YAML problem but a schema problem.
> imho, YAML's biggest failing to date is not making things like this clear enough to the community.
> Note: PyYAML has a BaseLoader schema that loads all scalar values as strings.
Algorithm discovers how six molecules could evolve into life’s building blocks
It'd be nice if they could do the same for protein synthesis, but that's obviously a much harder problem.
Folding@home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home :
> Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics to a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins, and is reliant on the simulations run on the volunteers' personal computers.
"AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery" (2020) https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-sci...
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2019/07/deepmind-protein-folding-u... :
> At last year’s Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction competition (CASP13), researchers from DeepMind made headlines by taking the top position in the free modeling category by a considerable margin, essentially doubling the rate of progress in CASP predictions of recent competitions. This is impressive, and a surprising result in the same vein as if a molecular biology lab with no previous involvement in deep learning were to solidly trounce experienced practitioners at modern machine learning benchmarks.
Citations of "Resource-efficient quantum algorithm for protein folding" (2019) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1037213034434902738...
Protein folding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding
I always wonder how many open research problems could benefit from a working hand from computing. Sometimes I wish research would be as available as an open-source project.
As a computer scientist who worked in a physics lab: a lot. Other sciences could desperately use the help of talented computer scientists. Unfortunately those other sciences are mostly mired in academia nonsense and don't pay well.
"Applied CS"
Computational science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_science
Computational biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_biology
Computational thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking :
> The characteristics that define computational thinking are decomposition, pattern recognition / data representation, generalization/abstraction, and algorithms.
Additional skills useful for STEM fields: system administration / DevOps / DevSecOps, HPC: High Performance Computing (distributed systems, distributed algorithms, performance optimization; rewriting code that is designed to test unknown things with tests and for performance), research a graph of linked resources and reproducibly publish in LaTeX and/or computational notebooks such as Jupyter notebooks, dask-labextension, open source tool development (& sustainable funding) that lasts beyond one grant
Physicists build circuit that generates clean, limitless power from graphene
"Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene" (2020) https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.0... https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.042101
> In the 1950s, physicist Léon Brillouin published a landmark paper refuting the idea that adding a single diode, a one-way electrical gate, to a circuit is the solution to harvesting energy from Brownian motion. Knowing this, Thibado's group built their circuit with two diodes for converting AC into a direct current (DC). With the diodes in opposition allowing the current to flow both ways, they provide separate paths through the circuit, producing a pulsing DC current that performs work on a load resistor.
> Additionally, they discovered that their design increased the amount of power delivered. "We also found that the on-off, switch-like behavior of the diodes actually amplifies the power delivered, rather than reducing it, as previously thought," said Thibado. "The rate of change in resistance provided by the diodes adds an extra factor to the power."
> The team used a relatively new field of physics to prove the diodes increased the circuit's power. "In proving this power enhancement, we drew from the emergent field of stochastic thermodynamics and extended the nearly century-old, celebrated theory of Nyquist," said coauthor Pradeep Kumar, associate professor of physics and coauthor.
> According to Kumar, the graphene and circuit share a symbiotic relationship. Though the thermal environment is performing work on the load resistor, the graphene and circuit are at the same temperature and heat does not flow between the two.
> That's an important distinction, said Thibado, because a temperature difference between the graphene and circuit, in a circuit producing power, would contradict the second law of thermodynamics. "This means that the second law of thermodynamics is not violated, nor is there any need to argue that 'Maxwell's Demon' is separating hot and cold electrons," Thibado said.
I don't understand. It sounds like they're drawing useful work (I think?) from a system that's already at thermodynamic equilibrium. Doesn't that violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics?
I'm not sure that I understand either. From the abstract (which phys.org failed to link to):
> The system reaches thermal equilibrium and the rates of heat, work, and entropy production tend quickly to zero. However, there is power generated by graphene which is equal to the power dissipated by the load resistor.
Looks like the article is also on ArXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09947
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cluster=103...
Is it really a closed system at equilibrium?
Mozilla shuts project Iodide: Datascience documents in browsers
I did this! I killed it and I didn't mean to.
Ten (10) days ago, I filed an issue in the iodide project: "Compatibility with 'percent' notebook format" https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide/issues/2942
And then six (6) days ago, I added this comment to that issue: https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide/issues/2942#issueco...
And now it's almost dead, and I didn't mean to kill it.
But I also suggested that it would be great if conda-forge had a WASM build target:
- "Consider moving CPython patches upstream" https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide/issues/635#issueco...
For students, being able to go to a URL and have a notebook interface with the SciPy stack preinstalled without needing to have an organization manage shell accounts and/or e.g. JupyterHub for every student should be worth the necessary budget allocation. Their local machines have plenty of CPU, storage, and memory for all but big data workloads.
Iodide is/was really cool. Pyiodide (much of the SciPy stack compiled to WASM) is also a great idea.
Jyve with latest JupyterLab, nbgrader, and configurable cloud storage could also solve.
Google Colab is an alternative to consider if you need to share Jupyter notebooks: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/intro.ipynb.
There are many ways to share reproducible Jupyter notebooks.
Google Colab now supports ipywidgets (js) in notebooks. While you can install additional packages in Colab, additional packages must be installed by each user (e.g. with `! pip install sympy` in an initial input cell) for each new kernel.
repo2docker builds a docker image from software dependency versions specified in e.g. requirements.txt, environment.yml, and/or a postInstall script and then installs a current version of JupyterLab in the container. Zero-to-BinderHub describes how to get BinderHub (which builds and launches containers) running on a hosting provider w/ k8s. awesome-python-in-education/blob/master/README.md#jupyter
Google AI Platform Notebooks is hosted JupyterLab.
awesome-jupyter > Hosted Notebook Solutions lists a number of services: https://github.com/markusschanta/awesome-jupyter#hosted-note...
awesome-python-in-education > Jupyter links to many Jupyter resources like nbgrader and BinderHub but not yet Jyve: https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...
Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
My initial thoughts; learn to drive, first aid, a sport, play an instrument, a language, how to manage finances, to speak in front of people.
- "Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894550
In no particular order:
- Food science; Nutrition
- Family planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning
- Personal finance (see the link above for resources)
- How to learn
- How to teach [reading and writing, STEM, respect, compassion]
- Compassion for others' suffering
- How to considerately escape from unhealthy situations
- Coping strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coping
- Defense mechanisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism
- Prioritization; productivity
- Goal setting; n-year planning; strategic alignment
Life skills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_skills
Khan Academy > Life Skills: https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
Four Keys Project metrics for DevOps team performance
> […] four key metrics that indicate the performance of a software development team:
> Deployment Frequency - How often an organization successfully releases to production
> Lead Time for Changes - The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
> Change Failure Rate - The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
> Time to Restore Service - How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in production
Ask HN: Resources to encourage teen on becoming computer engineer?
Howdy HN
A teenager I am close with would like to become a computer engineer. Whet resources, books, podcasts, camps, or experiences do you recommend to support this teen's endeavor?
"Ask HN: Something like Khan Academy but full curriculum for grade schoolers?" [through undergrads] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23794001
"Ask HN: How to introduce someone to programming concepts during 12-hour drive?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15454071
"Ask HN: Any detailed explanation of computer science" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15270458 : topologically-sorted? Information Theory and Constructor Theory are probably at the top:
> A bottom-up (topologically sorted) computer science curriculum (a depth-first traversal of a Thing graph) ontology would be a great teaching resource.
> One could start with e.g. "Outline of Computer Science", add concept dependency edges, and then topologically (and alphabetically or chronologically) sort.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
> There are many potential starting points and traversals toward specialization for such a curriculum graph of schema:Things/skos:Concepts with URIs.
> How to handle classical computation as a "collapsed" subset of quantum computation? Maybe Constructor Theory?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ ... Ctrl-F "interview", "curriculum"
CadQuery: A Python parametric CAD scripting framework based on OCCT
I wish more people would try this over openscad. I like openscad but the UI and with cadquery you use python! and now I noticed "CadQuery supports Jupyter notebook out of the box"
The jupyter-cadquery extension renders models with three.js via pythreejs in a sidebar with jupyterlab-sidecar: https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery#b-using-a-do...
https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery/blob/master/...
Array Programming with NumPy
Looks like there's a new citation for NumPy in town.
"Citing packages in the SciPy ecosystem" lists the existing citations for SciPy, NumPy, scikits, and other -Py things: https://www.scipy.org/citing.html ( source: https://github.com/scipy/scipy.org/blob/master/www/citing.rs... )
A better way to cite requisite software might involve referencing a https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication record in JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata; for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489651
But there's as of yet no way to publish JSON-LD, RDFa, or Microdata Linked Data from LaTeX with Computer Modern.
For some reason this struck me as inappropriate for the outlet. It's a nice piece as an introduction to array programming with numpy, but seemed out of place to me.
If, going forward, 5% of all papers that use NumPy to get their results actually cite this paper, it will be one of Nature's most cited papers every year.
There's an interesting trend of what content gets published in peer-reviewed journals vs. blogs/github/etc. I suspect there is an audience segment that strongly values peer reviewed pieces that are equivalent content wise to introductory material in a variety of formats.
I wonder if github should add a "Review" feature to provide a similar content authoring experience.
It would be nice if citing repositories were easier-- either for generating a reference for my own code or acknowledging when I've used someone else's code in my research.
There's tons of math and physics blogs that contain useful results that the author wanted to make available but didn't manage to incorporate into a paper. I wonder if there'd be any interest in a sort of GitHub for proofs? It could even use git, since (assuming consistency) isn't math just a DAG anyways (and therefore isomorphic to a neural net, as are all things).
You can get a free DOI for and archive a tag of a Git repo with FigShare or Zenodo.
If you have repo2docker REES dependency scripts (requirements.txt, environment.yml, postInstall,) in your repo, a BinderHub like https://mybinder.org can build and cache a container image and launch a (free) instance in a k8s cloud.
Journals haven't yet integrated with BinderHub.
Putting the suggested citation and DOI URI/URL in your README and cataloging citations in an e.g. wiki page may increase the crucial frequency of citation.
A Linked Data format for presenting well-formed arguments with #StructuredPremises would help to realize the potential of the web as a graph of resources which may satisfy formal inclusion criteria for #LinkedMetaAnalyses.
The issue is that none of the citation count engines (Google scholar, scopus, Web of Science...) count citations on those DOIs. So for a researcher who needs to somehow demonstrate impact through citation counts, it does not really help unfortunately.
We could reason about sites that index https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle according to our own and others' observations. Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and Meta all index Scholarly Articles: they copy the bibliographic metadata and the abstract for archival and schoarly purposes.
AFAIU, e.g. Zotero and Mendeley do not crawl and index articles or attempt to parse bibliographic citations from the astounding plethora of citation styles [citationstyles, citationstyles_stylerepo] into a citation graph suitable for representative metrics [zenodo_newmetrics].
bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf does not have a DOI, does not have an ORCID [orcid], and is not published in any journal but is indexed by e.g. Google Scholar; though there are apparently multiple records referring to a ScholarlyArticle with the same name and author. Something like "Hell's Angels" (1930)? No DOI, no ORCID, no parseable PDF structure: not indexed.
AFAIU, Google Scholar does not yet index ScholarlyArticle (or SoftwareApplication < CreativeWork) bibliographic metadata. GScholar indexes an older set of bibliographic metadata from HTML <meta> tags and also attempts to parse PDFs. [gscholar_inclusion]
Google Scholar is also not (yet?) integrated with Google Dataset Search (which indexes https://schema.org/Dataset metadata).
FigShare DOIs and Zenodo DOIs are DataCite DOIs [figshare_howtocite, zenodo_principles]; which apparently aren't (yet?) all indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar].
IIUC, all papers uploaded to https://arxiv.org are indexed by Google Scholar. In order for arxiv-vanity.org [arxiv_vanity] to render a mobile-ready, font-resizeable HTML5 version of a paper uploaded to ArXiV, the PostScript source must be uploaded. Arxiv hosts certain categories of ScholarlyArticles.
JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) has managed to get articles indexed by Google Scholar [rescience_gscholar]. They publish their costs [joss_costs]: $275 Crossref membership, DOIs: $1/paper:
> Assuming a publication rate of 200 papers per year this works out at ~$4.75 per paper
[citationstyles]: https://citationstyles.org
[citationstyles_stylerepo]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
[gscholar_inclusion]: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html#in...
[figshare_howtocite]: https://knowledge.figshare.com/articles/item/how-to-share-ci...
[zenodo_principles]: https://about.zenodo.org/principles/
[zenodo_newmetrics]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2017.00013...
[rescience_gscholar]: https://github.com/ReScience/ReScience/issues/38
[arxiv_vanity]: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/
[joss_costs]: https://joss.theoj.org/about#costs
[orcid]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCID
Do you like the browser bookmark manager?
How do you think it compares to services like webcull.com, raindrop.io, or getpocket.com? Have they advanced the field to the point that it's worth switching?
Things I'd add to browser bookmark managers someday:
- Support for (persisting) bookmarks tags. From the post re: the re-launch of del.icio.us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985623
> "Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916
> Notes re: how this could be standardized with JSON-LD: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916#c116
> The existing Web Experiment for persisting bookmark tags: https://github.com/azappella/webextension-experiment-tags/bl...
- Standard search features like operators: ((term) AND (term2)) OR term3
- Regex search
- (Chrome) show the createdDate and allow (non-destructive) sort by date
- Native sync API for syncing to zero or more bookmarks / personal data storage providers
- Support for integration with extensions that support actual resource metadata like Zotero
- Linked Data support: extract and store bibliographic metadata like Zotero and OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer
What are the current limitations of the WebExtensions Bookmarks API (now supported by Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and hopefully eventually Safari)?: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
NIST Samate – Source Code Security Analyzers
Additional lists of static analysis, dynamic analysis, SAST, DAST, and other source code analysis tools:
OWAP > Source Code Analysis Tools: https://owasp.org/www-community/Source_Code_Analysis_Tools
https://analysis-tools.dev/ (supports upvotes and downvotes)
analysis-tools-dev/static-analysis: https://github.com/analysis-tools-dev/static-analysis
analysis-tools-dev/dynamic-analysis: https://github.com/analysis-tools-dev/dynamic-analysis
devsecops/awesome-devsecops: https://github.com/devsecops/awesome-devsecops , https://github.com/TaptuIT/awesome-devsecops
kai5263499/awesome-container-security: https://github.com/kai5263499/awesome-container-security
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps#DevSecOps,_Shifting_Sec... :
> DevSecOps is an augmentation of DevOps to allow for security practices to be integrated into the DevOps approach. The traditional centralised security team model must adopt a federated model allowing each delivery team the ability to factor in the correct security controls into their DevOps practices.
awesome-safety-critical: https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
A Handwritten Math Parser in 100 lines of Python
Slightly more amusingly, but non-equivalently:
import sys
from functools import reduce
from operator import add, sub, mul, truediv as div
def calc(s, ops=[(add, '+'), (sub, '-'), (mul, '*'), (div, '/')]):
if not ops:
return float(s)
(func, token), *remaining_ops = ops
return reduce(func, (calc(part, remaining_ops) for part in s.split(token)))
if __name__ == '__main__':
print(calc(''.join(sys.argv[1:])))
This is pretty clever. There's a video by Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and currently making a programming language called Jai, that talks about parsing expressions with order of operations. He gives an simple approach that apparently was discovered recently (though he didn't remember the paper name) that does this in a single pass and hardly any more complicated than what you wrote. You can see it here [1]. He also trashes on using yacc/bison before that and on most academic parsing theory.
Reverse Polish notation (RPN) > Converting from infix notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation#Conver... > Shunting-yard algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting-yard_algorithm
Infix notation supports parentheses.
Infix notation: 3 + 4 × (2 − 1)
RPN: 3 4 2 1 − × +
PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac
I have a dream... that one day people will name their projects with names that don't exist on google yet.
If you search for PEP now you'll find python enhancement proposals, and the "Philippine Entertainment Portal" and the stock code for PepsiCo.
I wish that once people do name their project, they would assign it a 128-bit random number in lower case hex, and include that number on any web page that they would like people searching for their project to find.
That way once I know that say PEP the PDF editor exists and find its 128-bit number (let's say that is 379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc73), at least I can subsequently toss a +379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc73 on my searches to effectively let the search engine know I want PEP the PDF editor results rather than PEP the python enhancement results or PEP the entertainment portal results or PEP that refreshing beverage company stock symbol.
"xxd -l 16 -p /dev/urandom" is a handy way to get a 128-bit random hex number. A UUID generator works, too, although they usually include some punctuation you will need to delete and you might have to lower case their output.
> I wish that once people do name their project, they would assign it a 128-bit random number in lower case hex
We already have something similar: URLs.
tzs is proposing URNs rather than textual program names. A URL is unnecessarily specific (though I suppose you could anycast URL resolution)
> RFC 4122 defines a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace for UUIDs. A UUID presented as a URN appears as follows:[1]
> > urn:uuid:123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...
Version 4 UUIDs have 122 random bits (out of 128 bits total).
In Python:
>>> import uuid
>>> _id = uuid.uuid4()
>>> _id.urn
'urn:uuid:4c466878-a81b-4f22-a112-c704655fa4ee'
>>> _id.hex
'4c466878a81b4f22a112c704655fa4ee'
{"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebPage",
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"identifier": "urn:uuid:4c466878-a81b-4f22-a112-c704655fa4ee",
"url": ["", ""],
"name": [
"a schema.org/SoftwareApplication < CreativeWork < Thing",
{"@value": "a rose by any other name",
"@language": "en"}]}}
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target="_blank">https://schema.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://schema.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://schema.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://schema.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://schema.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://schema.org/" typeof="WebPage">
<div property="about" typeof="SoftwareApplication">
<meta property="identifier" content="urn:uuid:4c466878-a81b-4f22-a112-c704655fa4ee"/>
<span property="name">a schema.org/SoftwareApplication < CreativeWork < Thing</span>
<span property="name" lang="en">a rose by any other name</span>
</div>
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<meta itemprop="name" content="a rose by any other name" lang="en"/>
</div>
</div>The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
Redox: Unix-Like Operating System in Rust
I'm Jeremy Soller, the creator of Redox OS. Let me know if you have questions!
Are there tools to support static analysis and formal methods in Rust yet?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21839514 re: awesome-safety-critical https://awesome-safety-critical.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ :
> > Does Rust have a chance in mission-critical software? (currently Ada and proven C niches) https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5iv5j7/does_rust_have...
FWIU, Sealed Rust is in progress.
And there's also RustPython for the userspace.
Ask HN: How are online communities established?
HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. are all established communities with users. How do you start a community when you don't have any users?
You should read the book People Powered by Jono Bacon. Has some really good insights and is a 101 course on exactly this.
Seconded. "People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams" (2019) https://g.co/kgs/CF5TEk
"The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation" (2012) https://g.co/kgs/P2V1kn
"Tribes: We need you to lead us" (2011) https://g.co/kgs/T8jaFS
The 1% 'rule' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) :
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.
... Relevant metrics:
- Marginal cost of service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
- Customer acquisition cost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_acquisition_cost
- [Quantifiable and non-quantifiable] Customer Lifetime Value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value
Last words of the almost-cliche community organizer surrounded by dormant accounts: "Network effects will result in sufficient (grant) funding"
Business model examples that may be useful for building and supporting sustainable communities with clear Missions, Objectives, and Criteria for Success: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324
Python Documentation Using Sphinx
I usually generate new Python projects with a cookiecutter; such as cookiecutter-pypackage. I like the way that cookiecutter-pypackage includes a Makefile which has a `docs` task so that I can call `make docs` to build the sphinx docs in the docs/ directory which include:
- a /docs/readme.rst that includes the /README.rst as the first document in the toctree
- a sensible set of default documents: readme (.. include:: /README.rst), installation, usage, modules (sphinx-autodoc output), contributing, authors, history (.. include:: /HISTORY.rst)
- a sphinx conf.py that sets the docs' version and release attributes to pkgname.__version__; so that the version number only needs to be changed in one place (as long as setup.py or setup.cfg also read the version string from pkgname.__version__)
- a default set of extensions: ['sphinx.ext.autodoc', 'sphinx.ext.viewcode'] that generates API docs and includes '[source]' hyperlinks from the generated API docs to the transcluded syntax-highlighted source code and links back to the API docs from the source code
https://github.com/audreyfeldroy/cookiecutter-pypackage/tree...
There are a few styles of docstrings that Sphinx can parse and include in docs with e.g. sphinx-autodoc:
`:param, :type, :returns, :rtype` docstrings (which OP uses; and which pycontracts can read runtime parameter and return type contracts from https://andreacensi.github.io/contracts/ (though Python 3 annotations are now the preferred style for compile or editing-time typechecks))
Numpydoc docstrings: https://numpydoc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/format.html
Googledoc docstrings: https://sphinxcontrib-napoleon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
You can use Markdown with Sphinx in at least three ways:
MyST Markdown supports Sphinx and Docutils roles and directives. Jupyter Book builds upon MyST Markdown. With Jupyter Book, you can include Jupyter notebooks (which can include MyST Markdown) in your Sphinx docs. Executable notebooks are a much easier way to include up-to-date code outputs in docs. https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Sphinx (& ReadTheDocs) w/ recommonmark: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro/getting-started-...
Nbsphinx predates Jupyter Book and doesn't yet support MyST Markdown, but does support Markdown cells in Jupyter notebooks. Nbsphinx includes a parser for including .ipynb Jupyter notebooks in Sphinx docs. nbsphinx supports raw RST (ReST) cells in Jupyter notebooks and has great docs: https://nbsphinx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Nbdev is another approach; though it's not Sphinx:
> nbdev is a library that allows you to fully develop a library in Jupyter Notebooks, putting all your code, tests and documentation in one place.
> [...] Add %nbdev_export flags to the cells that define the functions you want to include in your python modules
https://github.com/fastai/nbdev
A few additional sources of docs for Sphinx and ReStructuredText:
Read The Docs docs > Getting Started with Sphinx > External Resources https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro/getting-started-...
CPython Devguide > "Documenting Python" https://devguide.python.org/documenting/
"How to write [Linux] kernel documentation" https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/doc-guide/index.html
awesome-sphinxdoc: https://github.com/yoloseem/awesome-sphinxdoc
... "Ask HN: Recommendations for Books on Writing [for engineers]?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945580
Traits of good remote leaders
And the evidence for these considerations is what?
They reference a study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10869-020-09698..., titled: "Who Emerges into Virtual Team Leadership Roles? The Role of Achievement and Ascription Antecedents for Leadership Emergence Across the Virtuality Spectrum".
Fortunately the references are free to view.
"Table 4 – Correlation of Development Phases, Coping Stages and Comfort Zone transitions and the Performance Model" in "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" White (2008) tabularly correlates the Tuckman group development phases (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning) with the Carnall coping cycle (Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, Internalization) and Comfort Zone Theory (First Performance Level, Transition Zone, Second Performance Level), and the White-Fairhurst TPR model (Transforming, Performing, Reforming). The ScholarlyArticle also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2...
IDK what's different about online teams in regards to performance management?
Show HN: Eiten – open-source tool for portfolio optimization
Is it possible to factor (e.g. GRI) sustainability criteria into the portfolio fitness function? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21922558
My concern is that - like any other portfolio optimization algorithm - blindly optimizing on fundamentals and short term returns will lead to investing in firms who just dump external costs onto people in the present and future; so, screening with sustainability criteria is important to me.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19111911 :
> awesome-quant lists a bunch of other tools for algos and superalgos: https://github.com/wilsonfreitas/awesome-quant
This is perfect. Thank you for sharing this.
I might start implementing some of these but would love for someone else to add a few PRs as well. The code is pretty modular especially if we want to add new strategies.
(Sustainable) Index ETFs in the stocks.txt universe would likely be less sensitive to single performers' effects in unbalanced portfolios.
> pyfolio.tears.create_interesting_times_tear_sheet measures algorithmic trading algorithm performance during "stress events" https://github.com/quantopian/pyfolio/blob/03568e0f328783a6a...
Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?
Are there any well funded tech startups / companies tackling major societal problems? Any of these fair game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues
----
I don't see or hear of any and want to know if this is just my bias or if there really is a shortage of resources in tech being allocated to solving the worlds most important problems. I'm sure I'm not the only engineer that's looking out for companies like this.
Ran into this previous Ask HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168902) that asked a similar question. However, here I wanna focus on the better funded efforts (not side projects, philanthropy etc).
One example I've heard so far is Tesla. Any others?
You can make an impact by solving important local and global problems by investing your time, career, and savings; by listing and comparing solutions.
As a labor market participant, you can choose to work for places that have an organizational mission that strategically aligns with local, domestic, and international objectives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment ... "Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141
As an investor, you can choose to invest in organizations that are making the sort of impact you're looking for: you can impact invest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
You mentioned "List of global issues"; which didn't yet have a link to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (the #GlobalGoals). I just added this to the linked article:
> As part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN Millenium Development Goals (2000-2015) were superseded by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2030), which are also known as The Global Goals. There are associated Targets and Indicators for each Global Goal.
There are 17 Global Goals.
Sustainability reporting standards can align with the Sustainable Development Goals. For example, the GRI standards are now aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
Investors, fund managers, and potential employees can identify companies which are making an impact by reviewing corporate sustainability and ESG reports.
From https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-develo... :
> SDG Target 12.6: "Encourage companies, especially large and transnational companies, to adopt sustainable practices and to integrate sustainability information into their reporting cycle"
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21302926 :
> > What are some of the corporate sustainability reporting standards?
> > From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_reporting#Initi... :
> >> Organizations can improve their sustainability performance by measuring (EthicalQuote (CEQ)), monitoring and reporting on it, helping them have a positive impact on society, the economy, and a sustainable future. The key drivers for the quality of sustainability reports are the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI),[3] (ACCA) award schemes or rankings. The GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines enable all organizations worldwide to assess their sustainability performance and disclose the results in a similar way to financial reporting.[4] The largest database of corporate sustainability reports can be found on the website of the United Nations Global Compact initiative.
> >The GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) Standards are now aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Reporting_Initiative
> >> In 2017, 63 percent of the largest 100 companies (N100), and 75 percent of the Global Fortune 250 (G250) reported applying the GRI reporting framework.[3]
What are some good ways to search for companies who (1) do sustainability reports, (2) engage in strategic alignment in corporate planning sessions, (3) make sustainability a front-and-center issue in their company's internal and external communications?
What are some examples of companies who have a focus on sustainability and/or who have developed a nonprofit organization for philanthropic missions which are sometimes best accounted for as a distinct organization or a business unit (which can accept and offer receipts for donations as a non-profit)?
How can an employee drive change in a small or a large company? Identify opportunities to deliver value and goodwill. Read through the Global Goals, Targets, and Indicators; and get into the habit of writing down problems and solutions.
3 pillars of [Corporate] Sustainability: (Environment (Society (Economy))). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability#Three_dimension...
"Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23907902 :
> We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits.
> We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an “HSA for Charity.” They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt.
> Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system.
> A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work.
"Salesforce Sustainability Cloud Becomes Generally Available" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22068522 :
> Are there similar services for Sustainability Reporting and accountability?
Column Names as Contracts
I really like the idea of being more thoughtful about naming columns and being more explicit about the “type” of data contained in them.
Is this idea already known among data modelers or data engineers?
I’d love to read any other references, if available.
I am a data architect in my day job. Within the realm of data management, I'd say "metadata management" [1] is the general category this fits within.
I would say, yes this idea is known/very common, as data architecture is as much about the descriptive language we use as anything. I mean, "business glossaries", taxonomy, even just naming conventions [2] in coding, these are all related.
If you build enough databases/tables or even code yourself, you inevitably come across the "how to name things" problem [3]. If all you have to sort on for the known meaning of a thing (column, table, file, etc.) is a single string value, then encoding meaning into it is quite common. This way, a sort creates a kind of "grouping". Many database vendors follow standard naming conventions - such as Oracle, for example [4]. It is considered a best practice when designing/building the metadata for a large system, to establish a naming convention. Among other things, it makes finding things easier, as well as all the potential for automation.
You get all kinds of variations on this, such as, should the "ID_" come as a prefix or a suffix (i.e. "_ID"). One's initial thought is to use it as a prefix so all the related types group together, but then that becomes much more difficult if you want to sort items by their functional area (e.g. DRIVER_ID, DRIVER_IND, etc.).
One other place you see something similar is in "smart numbers" which is an eternal argument - should I use a "dumb identifier" (GUID, integer) or a "smart one" (one encoding additional meaning) [5].
I mean, basically, any time you can encode information in the meta-data of data, I think you can then operate on it by following "convention over configuration" (as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion comments).
The only problem I see is that such conventions can, at times be limiting - depending on the length of your metadata columns, and the variability you are trying to capture - which is why I believe, generally, metadata is often better separated and linked to the data it describes - this decoupling allows for much more descriptive metadata than one could encode in simple a single string value. Certainly, you can get a long way with an approach like this, but I suspect you would run into 80/20 rule limitations.
Using naming in this way is a form of tight coupling, which could be seen as an anti-pattern in terms of meta-data flexibility, in some cases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_management
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_convention_(programming...
[3] https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
[4] https://oracle-base.com/articles/misc/naming-conventions
In terms of database normalization, delimiting multiple fields within a column name field violates the "atomic columns" requirement of the first though sixth normal forms (1NF - 6NF)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
Are there standards for storing columnar metadata (that is, metadata about the columns; or column-level metadata)?
In terms of columns, SQL has (implicit ordinal, name, type) and then primary key, index, and [foreign key] constraints.
RDFS (RDF Schema) is an open W3C linked data standard. An rdf:Property may have a rdfs:domain and a rdfs:range; where the possible datatypes are listed as instances of rdfs:range. Primitive datatypes are often drawn from XSD (XML Schema Definition), or https://schema.org/ . An rdfs:Class instance may be within the rdfs:domain and/or the rdfs:range of an rdf:Property.
RDFS is generally not sufficient for data validation; there are a number of standards which build upon RDFS: W3C SHACL (Shapes and Constraint Language), W3C CSVW (CSV on the Web).
There is some existing work on merging JSON Schema and SHACL.
CSVW builds upon the W3C "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web"; which supports arbitrary "annotations" on columns. CSVW can be represented as any RDF representation: Turtle/Trig/M3, RDF/XML, JSON-LD.
https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/
https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/ :
> an annotated tabular data model: a model for tables that are annotated with metadata. Annotations provide information about the cells, rows, columns, tables, and groups of tables […]
...
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901992073846456321 :
> "7 metadata header rows (column label, property URI path, DataType, unit, accuracy, precision, significant figures)" https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibilit...
...
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1295774405923147778 :
> Relevant: https://discuss.ossdata.org/ topics: "Linked Data formats, tools, challenges, opportunities; CSVW, https://schema.org/Dataset , https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle " https://discuss.ossdata.org/t/linked-data-formats-tools-chal...
> "A dataframe protocol for the PyData ecosystem" https://discuss.ossdata.org/t/a-dataframe-protocol-for-the-p...
> A .meta protocol should implement the W3C Tabular Data Model: [...]
...
The various methods of doing CSV2RDF and R2RML (SQL / RDB to RDF Mapping) each have a way to specify additional metadata annotations. None stuff data into a column name (which I'm also guilty of doing with e.g. "columnspecs" in a small line-parsing utility called pyline that can cast columns to Python types and output JSON lines).
...
Even JSON5 is insufficient when it comes to representing e.g. complex fractions: there must be a tbox (schema) in order to read the data out of the abox (assertions; e.g. JSON). JSON-LD is sufficient for representation; and there are also specs like RDFS, SHACL, and CSVW.
Abox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abox
I see the line of thinking you're going down. There are ISO standards for data types, in a sense I could see why one would seek a standard language for defining the metadata/specification of a type as data. Have to really think about that some more.. in a way a regex could be seen as a compact form of expressing the capability of a column in terms of value ranges or domains, but to define the meaning of the data, not so much.
Your interpretation of the atomic columns requirement is a little different than my understanding. That requirement of normalization only applies to the "cells" of columnar data, it says nothing about encoding meaning into column names, which are themselves simply descriptive metadata.
I mean, for sure you wouldn't want to encode many values/meanings into a column name (some systems have length restrictions that would make that impossible, I'm not sure it makes sense anyway), but just pointing out that technically the spec does not make that illegal. Certainly, adding minor annotations within the name of a column separated by a supported delimiter does not, in my opinion, violate normalization rules at all. I mean things like "ID_" or similar.
Have you looked at INFORMATION_SCHEMA in SQL databases? [1] You mentioned SQL metadata and constraints, that is as close to a standard feature for querying that information there is, some databases do it using similar but non-standard ways (Oracle for example).
Also, not standard but, many relational databases support extended properties or Metadata for objects (tables, views, columns, etc.) - you can often come up with your own scheme although rarely do I see people utilize these features. [2] [3]
At some point it feels like we are more talking about type definitions and annotations, applied to data columns.
Maybe like, BNF [4] for purely data table columns (which are essentially types)?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_schema
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-comment.ht...
[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/sy...
Graph Representations for Higher-Order Logic and Theorem Proving (2019)
ONNX (and maybe RIF) are worth mentioning.
ONNX: https://onnx.ai/ :
> ONNX is an open format built to represent machine learning models. ONNX defines a common set of operators - the building blocks of machine learning and deep learning models - and a common file format to enable AI developers to use models with a variety of frameworks, tools, runtimes, and compilers
RIF (~FOL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_Interchange_Format
Datalog (not Turing-complete): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog
HOList Benchmark: https://sites.google.com/view/holist/home
"HOList: An Environment for Machine Learning of Higher-Order Theorem Proving" (2019) https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03241
> Abstract: We present an environment, benchmark, and deep learning driven automated theorem prover for higher-order logic. Higher-order interactive theorem provers enable the formalization of arbitrary mathematical theories and thereby present an interesting, open-ended challenge for deep learning. We provide an open-source framework based on the HOL Light theorem prover that can be used as a reinforcement learning environment. HOL Light comes with a broad coverage of basic mathematical theorems on calculus and the formal proof of the Kepler conjecture, from which we derive a challenging benchmark for automated reasoning. We also present a deep reinforcement learning driven automated theorem prover, DeepHOL, with strong initial results on this benchmark.
I wonder why they don't mention any work based on transformer architectures? The recent work on solving differential equations based on expressions in reverse polish notation seemed like a reasonable idea to apply to theorem proving as well.
Really cool work though!
A transformer is unable to really represent logic, let alone higher order logic and theorem proving.
A transformer is a universal function approximator. The question is whether it can do so reasonably efficiently. Trained on natural language linear sequences, I’m with you. Trained on abstract logical graph representations? I don’t think that question’s answered yet, unless I’m missing something.
How do transformers handle with truth tables, logical connectives, and propositional logic / rules of inference, and first-order logic?
Truth table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table
Logical connective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_connective
Propositional logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus
Rules of inference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_inference
DL: Description logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_logic (... The OWL 2 profiles (EL, QR, RL; DL, Full) have established decideability and complexity: https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/ )
FOL: First-order logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic
HOL: Higher-order logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_logic
In terms of regurgitating without critical reasoning?
Critical reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
Think about a program that can write code but not execute it. It’s not hard to get a transformer to learn to write python code like merge sort or simple arithmetic code, even though a transformer can’t reasonably learn to sort, nor can it learn simple arithmetic. It’s an important disambiguation. In one view it appears it can’t (learn to sort) and in another it demonstrably can (learn to code up a sort function). It can learn to usefully manipulate the language without needing the capacity to execute the language. They probably can’t learn to “execute” what you’re talking about (execute being a loose analogy), but I’d say the jury’s out on whether they can learn to usefully manipulate it.
Transformer is a function from seq of symbols to seq of symbols. For example, truth table is exactly similar kind of function from variables to [True, False] alphabet.
Transformer can represent some very complex logical operations, and per this article is turing complete: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.03429, meaning any computable function, including theorem prover can be represented as transformer.
Another question is if it is feasible/viable/rational to build transformer for this? My intuition says: no.
Show HN: Linux sysadmin course, eight years on
Almost eight years ago I launched an online “Linux sysadmin course for newbies” here at HN.
It was a side-project that went well, but never generated enough money to allow me to fully commit to leaving the Day Job. After surviving the Big C, and getting made redundant I thought I might improve and relaunch it commercially – but my doctors are a pessimistic bunch, so it looked like I didn’t have the time.
Instead, I rejigged/relaunched it via a Reddit forum this February as free and open - and have now gathered a team of helpers to ensure that it keeps going each month even after I can’t be involved any longer.
It’s a month-long course which restarts each month, so “Day 1” of September is this coming Monday.
It would be great if you could pass the word on to anyone you know who may be the target market of those who: “...aspire to get Linux-related jobs in industry - junior Linux sysadmin, devops-related work and similar”.
[0] http://www.linuxupskillchallenge.org/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge/
[2] http://snori74.blogspot.com/2020/04/health-status.html
There are a number of resources that may be useful for your curriculum for this project listed in "Is there a program like codeacademy but for learning sysadmin?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469266 :
> [ http://www.opsschool.org/ , https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin/blob/master/README... , https://github.com/stack72/ops-books , https://landing.google.com/sre/books/ , https://response.pagerduty.com/ (Incident Response training)]
To that I'd add that K3D (based on K3S, which is now a CNCF project) runs Kubernetes (k8s) in Docker containers. https://github.com/rancher/k3d
For zero-downtime (HA: High availability) deployments, "Zero-Downtime Deployments To a Docker Swarm Cluster" describes Rolling Updates and Blue-Green Deployments; with illustrations: https://github.com/vfarcic/vfarcic.github.io/blob/master/doc...
For git-push style deployment with more of a least privileges approach (which also has more moving parts) you could take a look at: https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes#function...
And also reference ansible molecule and testinfra for writing sysadmin tests and the molecule vagrant driver for testing docker configurations. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/testing-your-ansible-...
https://molecule.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ :
> With Testinfra you can write unit tests in Python to test actual state of your servers configured by management tools like Salt, Ansible, Puppet, Chef and so on.
> Testinfra aims to be a Serverspec equivalent in python and is written as a plugin to the powerful Pytest test engine.
I wasn't able to find a syllabus or a list of all of the daily posts? Are you focusing on DevOps and/or DevSecOps skills?
EDIT: The lessons are Markdown files in a Git repo: https://github.com/snori74/linuxupskillchallenge
Links to each lesson, the title and/or subjects of the lesson, and the associated reddit posts might be useful in a Table of Contents in the README.md.
Thanks, but most of that would be way over the top for my "newbies".
However, You must be the third or fourth person today to suggest that I add a TOC - so that is something I think I'll need to look at!
Maybe most useful as resources for further study.
Looks like Day 20 covers shell scripting. A few things worth mentioning:
You can write tests for shell scripts and write TAP (Test Anything Protocol) -formatted output: https://testanything.org/producers.html#shell
Quoting in shell scripts is something to be really careful about:
> This and this do different things:
# prints a newline
echo $(echo "-e a\nb")
# prints "-e a\nb"
echo "$(echo "-e a\nb")"
LearnXinYminutes has a good bash reference: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/bash/
And an okay Ansible reference, which (like Ops School) we should contribute to: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/ansible/
Why do so many pros avoid maintaining shell scripts and writing one-off commands that they'll never remember to run again later?
...
It may be helpful to format these as Jupyter notebooks with input and output cells.
- Ctrl-Shift-Minus splits a cell at the cursor
- M and Y toggle a cell between Markdown and code
If you don't want to prefix every code cell line with a '!' so that the ipykernel Jupyter python kernel (the default kernel) executes the line with $SHELL, you can instead install and select bash_kernel; though users attempting to run the notebooks interactively would then need to also have bash_kernel installed: https://github.com/takluyver/bash_kernel
You can save a notebook .ipynb to any of a number of Markdown and non-Markdown formats https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/formats.html#markd... ; unfortunately jupytext only auto-saves to md without output cell content for now: https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext/issues/220
You can make reveal.js slides (that do include outputs) from a notebook: https://gist.github.com/mwouts/04a6dfa571bda5cc59fa1429d1309...
With nbconvert, you can manually save an .ipynb Jupyter notebook as Markdown which includes the cell outputs w/ File > "Download as / Export Notebook as" > "Export notebook to Markdown" or with the CLI: https://nbconvert.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#conver...
jupyter convert --to markdown
jupyter convert --help
jupyter-book build mybook/
From https://westurner.github.io/tools/#bash :
type bash
bash --help
help help
help type
apropos bash
info bash
man bash
man man
info info
info bash -n "Bash Startup Files"
...
Re: dotfiles, losing commands that should've been logged to HISTFILE when running multiple bash sessions and why I wrote usrlog.sh: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-20671184 (Ctrl-F for: "dotfiles", "usrlog.sh", "inputrc")
https://github.com/webpro/awesome-dotfiles
...
awesome-sysadmin > resources: https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin#resources
Software supply chain security
Estimates of prevalence do assume detection. How would we detect that a dependency that was installed a few deployments and reboots ago was compromised?
How does the classic infosec triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) apply to software supply chain security?
Confidentiality: Presumably we're talking about open source projects; which aren't confidential. Projects may request responsible disclosure in an e.g. security.txt; and vuln reports may be confidential for at least a little while.
Integrity: Secure transport protocols, checksums, and cryptographic code signing are ways to mitigate data integrity risks. GitHub supports SSH, 2FA, and GPG keys. Can all keys in the package signature keyring be used to sign any package? Can we verify a public key over a different channel? When we specify exact versions of software dependencies, can we also record package hashes which the package installer(s) will verify?
Availability: What are the internal and external data, network, and service dependencies for the development and deployment DevSecOps workflows? Can we deploy from local package mirrors? Who is responsible for securing and updating local package mirrors? Are these service dependencies all HA? Does everything in this system also depend upon the load balancer? Does our container registry support e.g. Docker Notary (TUF)? How should we mirror TUF package repos?
See also: "Guidance for [[transparent] proxy cache] partial mirrors?" https://github.com/theupdateframework/specification/issues/1...
A toolset that answers some of your questions is grafeas- a metadata store at https://github.com/grafeas/grafeas- and kritis, a policy engine at https://github.com/grafeas/kritis.
Cheers.
Thanks for the links. Do you know how this toolset helps to mitigate/prevent what is called in the GitHub blogpost "Supply chain compromises". Quickly checked around and couldn't find anything that applies to the dependencies of applications/binaries before they land into the target runtime (i.e k8s).
Have you seen these preso slides
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/aysylu/q-con-sp-software-s....
They walk through one of the workflows (end state is deploying to k8s).
Grafeas is a metadata store, Kritis is a policy engine that plugs into k8s as an admission controller- blessing the "admission" (running) of an image in a namespace.
There are existing tools for each language/runtime that produce known vuln lists for individual artifacts in the language ecosystem. These you feed into Grafeas. And you have your CI pipeline providing manifests for each of your built images that contain all upstream dependencies (these produced from each app's build tool). Then at deploy time, Kritis checks the manifest on the image, and for each artifact in the image, checks for vulns and determines whether the vuln should keep the image from being deployed.
Hope that helps. There are many other workflows but that one is the most direct.
Cheers.
OUTSTANDING comment; excellent questions. Bookmarked. Thanks for this concise high-level infosec punchlist.
This Sir is senior.
Mind Emulation Foundation
"While we are far from understanding how the mind works, most philosophers and scientists agree that your mind is an emergent property of your body. In particular, your body’s connectome. Your connectome is the comprehensive network of neural connections in your brain and nervous system. Today your connectome is biological. "
This is a pretty speculative thesis. It's not at all clear that everything relevant to the mind is found in the connections rather than the particular biochemical processes of the brain. It's a very reductionist view that drastically underestimates the biological complexity of even individual cells. There's a good book, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell, by Dennis Bray going into detail on how much functionality and physical processes are at work even in the most simplest cells that is routinely ignored by these analogies of the brain to a digital computer.
There is this extreme, and I would argue unscientific bias towards treating the mind as something that's recreatable in a digital system probably because it enables this science-fiction speculation and dreams of immortality of people living in the cloud.
Indeed. We humans largely create devices that function either through calculation or through physical reaction, relying on the underlying rules of the universe to "do the math" of, say, launching a cannonball and having it follow a consistent arc. The brain combines both at almost every level. It may be fundamentally impossible to emulate a human personality equal to a real one without a physics simulation of a human brain and its chemistry.
A dragonfly brain takes the input from thirty thousand visual receptor cells and uses it to track prey movement using only sixteen neurons. Could we do the same using an equal volume of transistors?
No one is saying a neuron is a one to one equivalent with a transistor. That behavior does seem like it's possible to emulate with many transistors, however.
Was just talking about quantum cognition and memristors (in context to GIT) a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317768
Quantum cognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition
Memristor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
It may yet be possible to sufficiently functionally emulate the mind with (orders of magnitude more) transistors. Though, is it necessary to emulate e.g. autonomic functions? Do we consider the immune system to be part of the mind (and gut)?
Perhaps there's something like an amplituhedron - or some happenstance correspondence - that will enable more efficient simulation of quantum systems on classical silicon pending orders of magnitude increases in coherence and also error rate in whichever computation medium.
For abstract formalisms (which do incorporate transistors as a computation medium sufficient for certain tasks), is there a more comprehensive set than Constructor Theory?
Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
Amplituhedron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron
What is the universe using our brains to compute? Is abstract reasoning even necessary for this job?
Something worth emulating: Critical reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_reasoning
13 Beautiful Tools to Enhance Online Teaching and Learning Skills
"Options for giving math talks and lectures online" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22541754 also lists a number of resources for teaching math online.
How close are computers to automating mathematical reasoning?
It's irresponsible to not mention that a series of results from the 1930s through the 1950s proved that generalized automated proof search is impossible, in the sense that we cannot just ask a computer to find a proof or refutation of Goldbach's Conjecture or other "Goldbach-type" statement and have it do any better than a person. In that sense, no, computers will never fully automate mathematical reasoning, because mathematical reasoning cannot be fully automated.
What we can automate, and have successfully automated many times over, is proof checking. In that sense, yes, computers have already fully automated mathematical reasoning, because checking proofs is fully formalized and mechanized.
I think that what people really ought to be asking for is the ease with which we find new results and communicate them to others. In that sense, computer-aided proofs can be hard to read and so there is much work to be done in making them easier to communicate to humans. Similarly, there is interesting work being done on how to make computer-generated proofs which use extremely-high-level axiom schemata to generate human-like handwaving abstractions.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the ATP/ITP terminology used here. ATPs are either of the weak sort that crunch through SAT, graphs, and other complete-but-hard problems, or the strong sort which are impossible. Meanwhile, folks have drifted from "interactive" to "assistant", and talk of "proof assistants" as tools which, like a human, can write down and look at sections of a proof in isolation, but cannot summon complete arbitrary proofs from its own mind.
Edit: One edit will be quicker than two replies and I tend to be "posting too fast". The main point is captured well by [0], but they immediately link to [1], the central result, which links to [2], an important corollary. At this point, I'm just going to quote WP:
> The first [Gödel] incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.
> The second [Gödel] incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.
> Informally, [Tarski's Undefinability] theorem states that arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic.
I recognize that these statements may seem surprising, but they are provable and you should convince yourself of them. I recently reviewed [3] and found it to be a very precise and complete introduction to all of the relevant ideas; there's also GEB if you want something more fun.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_proving#Deci...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...
[3] https://www.logicmatters.net/resources/pdfs/godelbook/GodelB...
As someone unfamiliar with the results you describe, why can’t a machine do better than a human? A smart human is better at writing proofs than a dumb one. If we had a highly advanced general artificial intelligence, why couldn’t it generate better results than the smart humans?
Or is automated proof search impossible for humans as well?
Arguably, humans require more energy per operation. So, presumably such an argument hinges upon what types of operations are performed in conducting automated proof search?
What would "automated proof search" even mean in the context of being performed by a human being?
The context here is that certain problems cannot be solved by an algorithm, which doesn't necessarily translate into "cannot be performed by a machine".
It only means that there cannot be any Turing machine capable of solving them, no matter what "operations" it represents.
The task (in terms of constructor theory) is: Find the functions that sufficiently approximate the observations and record their reproducible derivations.
Either the (unreferenced) study was actually arguing that "automated proof search" can't be done at all, or that human neural computation is categorically non-algorothmic.
Grid search of all combinations of bits that correspond to [symbolic] classical or quantum models.
Or better: evolutionary algorithms and/or neural nets.
Roger Penrose argues that human neural computation is indeed non-algorithmic in nature (see his book "The Emperor's New Mind"; 1989) and speculates that quantum processes are involved.
I don't quite understand the role of neural nets in that context, though. Those just classical computations in the end and should be bound by the same limits that every other algorithms are, shouldn't they?
That human cognition is quantum in nature - that e.g. entanglement is necessary - may be unfalsifiable.
Neuromorphic engineering has expanded since the 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_engineering
Quantum computing is the best known method for simulating chemical reactions and thereby possibly also neurochemical reactions. But, Is quantum computing necessary to functionally emulate human cognition?
It may be that a different computation medium can accomplish the same tasks without emulating all of the complexity of the brain.
If the brain is only classical and some people are using their brains to perform quantum computations, there may be something there.
Quantum cognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition
Quantum memristors are still elusive.
From "Quantum Memristors in Frequency-Entangled Optical Fields" (2020) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7079656/ :
> Apart from the advantages of using these devices for computation [12] (such as energy efficiency [13], compared to transistor-based computers), memristors can be also used in machine learning schemes [14,15]. The relevance of the memristor lies in its ubiquitous presence in models which describe natural processes, especially those involving biological systems. For example, memristors inherently describe voltage-dependent ion-channel conductances in the axon membrane in neurons, present in the Hodgkin–Huxley model [16,17].
> Due to the inherent linearity of quantum mechanics, it is not straightforward to describe a dissipative non-linear memory element, such as the memristor, in the quantum realm, since nonlinearities usually lead to the violation of fundamental quantum principles, such as no-cloning theorem. Nonetheless, the challenge was already constructively addressed in Ref. [18]. This consists of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a dissipative environment, where the coupling is changed based on the results of a weak measurement scheme with classical feedback. As a result of the development of quantum platforms in recent years, and their improvement in controllability and scalability, different constructions of a quantum memristor in such platforms have been presented. There is a proposal for implementing it in superconducting circuits [7], exploiting memory effects that naturally arise in Josephson junctions. The second proposal is based on integrated photonics [19]: a Mach–Zehnder interferometer can behave as a beam splitter with a tunable reflectivity by introducing a phase in one of the beams, which can be manipulated to study the system as a quantum memristor subject to different quantum state inputs.
Quantum harmonic oscillators have also found application in modeling financial markets. Quantum harmonic oscillator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator
New framework for natural capital approach to transform policy decisions
Natural capital: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital
> Natural capital is the world's stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms. Some natural capital assets provide people with free goods and services, often called ecosystem services. Two of these (clean water and fertile soil) underpin our economy and society, and thus make human life possible.
Natural capital accounting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital_accounting
> Natural capital accounting is the process of calculating the total stocks and flows of natural resources and services in a given ecosystem or region.[1] Accounting for such goods may occur in physical or monetary terms. This process can subsequently inform government, corporate and consumer decision making as each relates to the use or consumption of natural resources and land, and sustainable behaviour.
Opportunity cost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
> When an option is chosen from alternatives, the opportunity cost is the "cost" incurred by not enjoying the benefit associated with the best alternative choice.[1] The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as "the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen."[2] In simple terms, opportunity cost is the benefit not received as a result of not selecting the next best option. Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice". [3] The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in attempts to ensure that scarce resources are used efficiently.[4] Opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs: the real cost of output forgone, lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered an opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of a product or service is the revenue that could be earned by its alternative use.
How do we value essential dependencies in terms of future opportunity costs?
In terms of just mental health?
"National parks a boost to mental health worth trillions: study" https://phys.org/news/2019-11-national-boost-mental-health-w...
> Visits to national parks around the world may result in improved mental health valued at about $US6 trillion (5.4 trillion euros), according to a team of ecologists, psychologists and economists
> Professor Bateman's decision-making framework focuses on the links between the environment and economy and has three components: efficiency, assessing which option generates the greatest benefit; sustainability, the effects of each option on natural capital stocks; and equity, regarding who receives the benefits of a decision and when.
Ian J. Bateman et al. "The natural capital framework for sustainably efficient and equitable decision making", Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-0552-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0552-3
Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?
"Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research" http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... :
> Rule 1: For Every Result, Keep Track of How It Was Produced
> Rule 2: Avoid Manual Data Manipulation Steps
> Rule 3: Archive the Exact Versions of All External Programs Used
> Rule 4: Version Control All Custom Scripts
> Rule 5: Record All Intermediate Results, When Possible in Standardized Formats
> Rule 6: For Analyses That Include Randomness, Note Underlying Random Seeds
> Rule 7: Always Store Raw Data behind Plots
> Rule 8: Generate Hierarchical Analysis Output, Allowing Layers of Increasing Detail to Be Inspected
> Rule 9: Connect Textual Statements to Underlying Results
> Rule 10: Provide Public Access to Scripts, Runs, and Results
... You can get a free DOI for and archive a tag of a Git repo with FigShare or Zenodo.
... re: [Conda and] Docker container images https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24226604 :
> - repo2docker (and thus BinderHub) can build an up-to-date container from requirements.txt, environment.yml, install.R, postBuild and any of the other dependency specification formats supported by REES: Reproducible Execution Environment Standard; which may be helpful as Docker Hub images will soon be deleted if they're not retrieved at least once every 6 months (possibly with a GitHub Actions cron task)
BinderHub builds a container with the specified versions of software and installs a current version of Jupyter Notebook with repo2docker, and then launches an instance of that container in a cloud.
“Ten Simple Rules for Creating a Good Data Management Plan” http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou... :
> Rule 6: Present a Sound Data Storage and Preservation Strategy
> Rule 8: Describe How the Data Will Be Disseminated
... DVC: https://github.com/iterative/dvc
> Data Version Control or DVC is an open-source tool for data science and machine learning projects. Key features:
> - Simple command line Git-like experience. Does not require installing and maintaining any databases. Does not depend on any proprietary online services. Management and versioning of datasets and machine learning models. Data is saved in S3, Google cloud, Azure, Alibaba cloud, SSH server, HDFS, or even local HDD RAID.
> - Makes projects reproducible and shareable; helping to answer questions about how a model was built.
There are a number of great solutions for storing and sharing datasets.
... "#LinkedReproducibility"
Open textual formats for data and open source application and system software (more precisely, FLOSS), are just as important.
Imagine that x86 - and with it, the PC platform - gets replaced by ARM within a decade. For binary software, this would be a kind of geological extinction event.
The likelihood of there being a [security] bug discovered in a given software project over any significant period of time is near 100%.
It's definitely a good idea to archive source and binaries and later confirm that the output hasn't changed with and without upgrading the kernel, build userspace, execution userspace, and PUT/SUT Package/Software Under Test.
- Specify which versions of which constituent software libraries are utilized. (And hope that a package repository continues to serve those versions of those packages indefinitely). Examples: Software dependency specification formats like requirements.txt, environment.yml, install.R
- Mirror and archive all dependencies and sign the collection. Examples: {z3c.pypimirror, eggbasket, bandersnatch, devpi as a transparent proxy cache}, apt-cacher-ng, pulp, squid as a transparent proxy cache
- Produce a signed archive which includes all requisite software. (And host that download on a server such that data integrity can be verified with cryptographic checksums and/or signatures.) Examples: Docker image, statically-linked binaries, GPG-signed tarball of a virtualenv (which can be made into a proper package with e.g. fpm), ZIP + GPG signature of a directory which includes all dependencies
- Archive (1) the data, (2) the source code of all libraries, and (3) the compiled binary packages, and (4) the compiler and build userspace, and (5) the execution userspace, and (6) the kernel. Examples: Docker can solve for 1-5, but not 6. A VM (virtual machine) can solve for 1-5. OVF (Open Virtualization Format) is an open spec for virtual machine images, which can be built with a tool like Vagrant or Packer (optionally in conjunction with a configuration management tool like Puppet, Salt, Ansible).
When the application requires (7) a multi-node distributed system configuration, something like docker-compose/vagrant/terraform and/or a configuration management tool are pretty much necessary to ensure that it will be possible to reproducibly confirm the experiment output at a different point in spacetime.
A deep dive into the official Docker image for Python
One thing I've learned is that rather than use a docker-entrypoint.sh, most Linux software can be ran just using the `--user 1000:1000` or whatever UID/GID you want to use, as long as you map a volume that can use those permissions. It is a lot cleaner this way.
> Why Tini?
> Using Tini has several benefits:
> - It protects you from software that accidentally creates zombie processes, which can (over time!) starve your entire system for PIDs (and make it unusable).
> - It ensures that the default signal handlers work for the software you run in your Docker image. For example, with Tini, SIGTERM properly terminates your process even if you didn't explicitly install a signal handler for it.
> - It does so completely transparently! Docker images that work without Tini will work with Tini without any changes.
[...]
> NOTE: If you are using Docker 1.13 or greater, Tini is included in Docker itself. This includes all versions of Docker CE. To enable Tini, just pass the `--init` flag to docker run.
https://github.com/krallin/tini#why-tini
I didn't know it was included by default. I'll check it out, thanks!
There are Alpine [1] and Debian [2] miniconda images (within which you can `conda install python==3.8` and 2.7 and 3.4 in different conda envs)
[1] https://github.com/ContinuumIO/docker-images/blob/master/min...
[2] https://github.com/ContinuumIO/docker-images/blob/master/min...
If you build manylinux wheels with auditwheel [3], they should install without needing compilation for {CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, and Alpine}; though standard Alpine images have MUSL instead of glibc by default, this [4] may work:
echo "manylinux1_compatible = True" > $PYTHON_PATH/_manylinux.py
[4] https://github.com/docker-library/docs/issues/904#issuecomme...
The miniforge docker images aren't yet [5][6] multi-arch, which means it's not as easy to take advantage of all of the ARM64 / aarch64 packages that conda-forge builds now.
[5] https://github.com/conda-forge/docker-images/issues/102#issu...
[6] https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/issues/20
There are i686 and x86-64 docker containers for building manylinux wheels that work with many distros: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux/tree/master/docker
A multi-stage Dockerfile build can produce a wheel in the first stage and install that wheel (with `COPY --from=0`) in a later stage; leaving build dependencies out of the production environment for security and performance: https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage-bu...
Interesting! I use miniconda extensively for local development to manage virtual environments for different python versions and love it. I hardly ever actually use the conda packages though.
I assume the main benefit of using these images would be if you are installing from conda repos instead of pip? Otherwise just using the official python images would be as good if not better
Edit: I guess if you needed multiple python versions in a single container this would be a good solution for that as well
Use cases for conda or conda+pip:
- Already-compiled packages (where there may not be binary wheels) instead of requiring reinstallation and subsequent removal of e.g. build-essentials for every install
- Support for R, Julia, NodeJS, Qt, ROS, CUDA, MKL, etc.
- Here's what the Kaggle docker-python Dockerfile installs with conda and with pip: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-python/blob/master/Dockerfi...
- Build matrix in one container with conda envs
Disadvantages of the official python images as compared with conda+pip:
- Necessary to (re)install build dependencies and a compiler for every build (if there's not a bdist or a wheel for the given architecture) and then uninstall all unnecessary transitive dependencies. This is where a [multi-stage] build of a manylinux wheel may be the best approach.
- No LSM (AppArmor, SELinux, ) for one or more processes in the container (which may have read access to /etc or environment variables and/or --privileged)
- Necessary to build basically everything on non x86[-64] architectures for every container build
Disadvantages of conda / conda+pip:
- Different package repo infrastructure to mirror
- Users complaining that they don't need conda who then proceed to re-download and re-build wheels locally multiple times a day
Additional attributes for comparison:
- The new pip solver (which is slower than the traditional iterative non-solver), conda, and mamba
- repo2docker (and thus BinderHub) can build an up-to-date container from requirements.txt, environment.yml, install.R, postBuild and any of the other dependency specification formats supported by REES: Reproducible Environment Execution Standard; which may be helpful as Docker Hub images will soon be deleted if they're not retrieved at least once every 6 months (possibly with a GitHub Actions cron task)
Quite a few conda packages have patches added by the conda team to help fix problems in packages relying on native code or binaries. Particularly on Windows. If something is available on the primary conda repos it will almost assuredly work with few of any problems cross-platform, whereas pip is hit or miss.
If you’re always on Linux you may never appreciate it but some pip packages are a nightmare to get working properly on Windows.
If you look through the source of the conda repos, you’ll see all kinds of small patches to fix weird and breaking edge cases, particularly in libs with significant C back ends.
Here's the meta.yml for the conda-forge/python-feedstock: https://github.com/conda-forge/python-feedstock/blob/master/...
It includes patches just like distro packages often do.
The Consortium for Python Data API Standards
This actually strikes me as a huuuge waste of effort. I work with every one of the different technologies they mention every day.
The differences and idiosyncrasies are truly, truly not a big deal and really what you want is to allow different library maintainers to do it all differently and just build your own adapters over top of them.
This allows library developers to worry about narrow use cases and have their own separate processes to introduce breaking changes and features that deal with extreme specifics like GPU or TPU interop, heterogeneous distributed backed arrays, jagged arrays, etc. etc.
Let a thousand flowers blossom and a thousand different Python array and record APIs contend.
End users can write their own adapters to mollify irregularities between them, possibly writing different adapters on a case by case basis.
If any “standard” adapters gain popularity as open source projects, great - but don’t try to bake that in from an RFC point of view into the array & data structure libraries themselves. Let them be free / whatever they want to be. That diversity of API approach is super valuable and easily mollified by your own custom adapter logic.
Personally, I like how the Julia ecosystem coalesced around a Tables.jl package that gives some consistency to tabular data packages that choose to implement it. Row-oriented or column-oriented, doesn't matter! Using Tables.jl they can be interchangeable.
There’s a huge difference between “I personally like it when some libraries choose to adhere to a convention” vs “let’s bake this into every tool with a wide, bureaucratic shared RFC process.”
But I don't think people are forced into following right? There's still choice. But if I was developing something in Python, I would rather join than not join.
I’m saying as a consumer of these libraries, I don’t want joiners, I want lots of different APIs that make different trade-offs for each use case, and I will write (or use) adapters if I need to (that’s my responsibility as a consumer).
Just because I personally either do or do not get some value out of a shared API standard doesn’t mean you do or do not, so personal feelings of what one likes need to be set aside, so the service boundary is at the level of consumers choosing their own adapters and making their own trade-offs.
If lots of libraries sign up, we all lose. Much slower compliance-constrained development cycles, less freedom for libraries to break the shared API contract in ways many users would be super happy to abide for the sake of a faster / better feature. Instead of making these trade-offs library by library, case by case, it’s made for you with standardization compliance as the highest constraint, regardless of the user base for which that does / doesn’t work well.
This strikes me as a bit pessimistic. I think you are mostly against _bad_ standards than standards per se.
If the consortium does its job well it will produce a good standard that all the major libraries like: from a UX as well as a performance viewpoint.
If it produces a bad standard, all that will happen is that nobody will sign up. No libraries are going to be _forced_ to do anything.
That’s fair except I’d say even good standards can cause a big slowdown in feature releases, and not everyone values the adherence to the standard as much as the features. It still seems better to just spin out the standard into a set of optional adapters and let library maintainers and users pick their own trade-offs in terms of when to adopt breaking changes, how / whether to smooth over idiosyncrasies across multiple libraries.
Even a good standard has costs and this particular case does not seem like it has good arguments in favor of a wide standard, but many arguments against it.
No, it's easy for library maintainers to offer a compat API in addition to however else they feel they need to differentiate and optimize the interfaces for array operations. People can contribute such APIs directly to libraries once instead of creating many conditionals in every library-utilizing project or requiring yet another dependency on an adapter / facade package that's not kept in sync with the libraries it abstracts.
If a library chooses to implement a spec compatability API, they do that once (optimally, as compared with somebody's hackish adapter facade which has very little comprehension of each library's internals) and everyone else's code doesn't need to have conditionals.
Each of L libraries implements a compat API: O(L)
Each of U library utilizers implements conditionals for every N places arrays are utilized: O(U x N_)
Each of U library utilizers uses the common denominator compat API: O(U)
L < U < (L + U) < (U x N_)
Tech giants let the Web's metadata schemas and infrastructure languish
It's "langushing" and they should do it for us? It's flourishing and they're doing it for us and they have lots of open issues and I want more for free without any work.
Wow! Nobody else does anything to collaboratively, inclusively develop schema and the problem is that search engines aren't just doing it for us?
1) Search engines do not owe us anything. They are not obligated to dominate us or the schema that we may voluntarily decide to include on our pages.
We've paid them nothing. They have no contract for service or agreement with us which compels them to please us or contribute greater resources to an open standard that hundreds of people are contributing to.
2) You people don't know anything about linked data and structured data.
Here's a list of schema: https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/ .
Here's the Linked Open Data Cloud: https://lod-cloud.net/
Does your or this publisher's domain include any linked data?
Does this article include any linked data?
Do data quality issues pervade promising, comparatively-expensive, redundant approaches to natural-language comprehension, reasoning, and summarization?
Here, in contributing this example PR adding RDFa to the codeforantarctica web page, I probably made a mistake. https://github.com/CodeForAntarctica/codeforantarctica.githu... . Can you spot the mistake?
There should have been review.
https://schema.org/ClaimReview, W3C Verifiable Claims / Credentials, ld-signatures, and lds-merkleproof2017.
Which brings us to reification, truth values, property graphs, and the new RDF* and SPARQL* and JSON-LD* (which don't yet have repos with ongoing issues to tend to).
3) Get to work. This article does nothing to teach people how to contribute to slow, collaborative schema standards work.
Here's the link to the GitHub Issues so that you can contribute to schema.org: https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg
...
"Standards should be better and they should pay for it"
Who are the major contributors to the (W3C) open standard in question?
Is telling them to put up more money or step down going to result in getting what we want? Why or why not?
Who would merge PRs and close issues?
Have you misunderstood the scope of the project? What do the editors of the schema feel in regards to more specific domain vocabularies? Is it feasible or even advisable to attempt to out-schema domain experts who know how to develop and revise an ontology or even just a vocabulary with Protegé?
To give you a sense of how much work goes into creating a few classes and properties defined with RDFS in RDFa in HTML: here's the https://schema.org/Course , https://schema.org/CourseInstance , and https://schema.org/EducationEvent issue: https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/195
Can you find the link to the Use Cases wiki (which was the real work)? What strategy did you use to find it?
...
"Well, Google just does what's good for Google."
Are you arguing that Google.org should make charitable contributions to this project? Is that an advisable or effective way to influence a W3C open standard (where conflicts of interest by people just donating time are disclosed)?
Anyone can use something like extruct or OSDS to extract RDFa, Microdata, and/or JSON-LD from a page.
Everyone can include structured data and linked data in their pages.
There are surveys quantifying how many people have included which types in their pages. Some of that data is included on schema.org types pages.
...
Some written interview questions:
> Which issues have you contributed to? Which issues have you seen all the way to closed? Have you contributed a pull request to the project? Have you published linked data? What is the URL to the docs which explain how to contribute resources? How would you improve them?
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1291903926007209984
...
After all that's happened here, I think Dan (who built FOAF, which all profitable companies could use instead of https://schema.org/Person ) deserves a week off to add more linked data to the internet now please.
I think that might be fair, but when she makes org came out it pitched itself as trust us we will take care of things, so yeah they don’t owe us anything but track record matters for trust in future ventures by these search engine orgs
schemaorg/schemaorg/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/blob/main/CONTRIBUTIN... explains how you and your organization can contribute resources to the Schema.org W3C project.
If you or your organization can justify contributing one or more people at full or part time due to ROI or goodwill, by all means start sending Pull Requests and/or commenting on Issues.
"Give us more for free or step down". Wow. What PRs have you contributed to justify such demands?
https://schema.org/docs/documents.html links to the releases.
Time-reversal of an unknown quantum state
T-symmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-symmetry > See also links to "reversible computing" but not the "time reversal" disambiguation page?
The "teeter-totter" thought experiment on that page is interesting to me in that it seems to illustrate how the future has more possibilities than the past. But it also occurs to me that the future possibilities are fractal with the past - ie. the toy could fall onto one of many other lower pedestals, teetering as it was before. In this way the "many arbitrary" possibilities could be perceived as anything but.
Electric cooker an easy, efficient way to sanitize N95 masks, study finds
An autoclave is what the electrical cooker is being used to emulate. A pressure cooker is a better option if you'll be on the road, camping, or otherwise without electricity. Researchers in Canada already proved several months ago that N95 masks could be sanitized this way:
Unfortunately the referenced NewsArticle does not link to the ScholarlyArticle https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle :
"N95 Mask Decontamination using Standard Hospital Sterilization Technologies" (2020-04) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20049346v... :
> We sought to test the ability of 4 different decontamination methods including autoclave treatment, ethylene oxide gassing, ionized hydrogen peroxide fogging and vaporized hydrogen peroxide exposure to decontaminate 4 different N95 masks of experimental contamination with SARS-CoV-2 or vesicular stomatitis virus as a surrogate. In addition, we sought to determine whether masks would tolerate repeated cycles of decontamination while maintaining structural and functional integrity. We found that one cycle of treatment with all modalities was effective in decontamination and was associated with no structural or functional deterioration. Vaporized hydrogen peroxide treatment was tolerated to at least 5 cycles by masks. Most notably, standard autoclave treatment was associated with no loss of structural or functional integrity to a minimum of 10 cycles for the 3 pleated mask models. The molded N95 mask however tolerated only 1 cycle. This last finding may be of particular use to institutions globally due to the virtually universal accessibility of autoclaves in health care settings.
The ScholarlyArticle referenced by and linked to by the OP NewsArticle is "Dry Heat as a Decontamination Method for N95 Respirator Reuse" (2020-07) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00534 . Said article does not reference "N95 Mask Decontamination using Standard Hospital Sterilization Technologies" DOI: 10.1101/2020.04.05.20049346v2 . We would do well to record that (article A, seemsToConfirm, Article B) as third-party linked data (only if both articles do specifically test the efficacy of the given sterilization method with the COVID-19 coronavirus)
None of this is necessary for non-healthcare workers, since the virus will die off on a fabric mask in a few hours.
1) Not a single study has demonstrated that viable Sars-Cov-2 virus survives on porous materials in the real world
2) Even before Covid, it was known for decades (common medical knowledge) that human coronaviruses and flu viruses do not remain viable on porous materials for more than several hours.
That this common knowledge is not so common knowledge among the public is a failure of public health communication. The one or two alarmist studies showing that the virus "survives" X number of days don't reflect the real world because 1) the researchers literally directly douse or soak the surface with a huge viral load, and 2) the researchers usually only look for viral genetic material, not whether the virus can infect cells. Viability != detecting viral genetic material (same story for people - we shed viral genetic material long after we stop being contagious).
There is a reason the CDC has always said surface transmission is rare: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/health/cdc-coronavirus-to... there have been no documented cases of surface transmission: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si... Fortunately some in the media are catching on to the hygiene (security) theater: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...
Citations for 1) and 2):
Most studies use unrealistic starting doses: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/laninf/PIIS1473-3099...
Other human coronaviruses don't survive long on porous surfaces (gone by 6 hours): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134510/. A hospital randomly collected patient and real surface swabs (including non-porous surfaces) for original SARS, a minority were PCR positive, none of the swabs were infectious (viral culture): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134510/. Same story for flu (virus can be detected for days, but inactive and not viable after a few hours): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222642/.
I could only find this study on Sars-Cov-2 that cultured the virus (still used a huge viral dose in a lab setting, not the real world). Even though they were able to culture the virus, only 1% of virus remains after 6 hours on a surgical mask, several orders of magnitude less for cotton clothing: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.07.20094805v...
This long post was originally meant to be a reply to someone asking for a citation; it's yet another example of how much effort is required to combat misinformation.
"Interim Recommendations for U.S. Households with Suspected or Confirmed Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)" https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si... :
> On the other hand, transmission of novel coronavirus to persons from surfaces contaminated with the virus has not been documented. Recent studies indicate that people who are infected but do not have symptoms likely also play a role in the spread of COVID-19. Transmission of coronavirus occurs much more commonly through respiratory droplets than through objects and surfaces, like doorknobs, countertops, keyboards, toys, etc. Current evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 may remain viable for hours to days on surfaces made from a variety of materials. Cleaning of visibly dirty surfaces followed by disinfection is a best practice measure for prevention of COVID-19 and other viral respiratory illnesses in households and community settings
Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
If anyone from the FED is reading this I have this advice: don't use ISO20022! (I've been working on the brazilian instant payments project, known as PIX). It's an overly-complicated-try-to-solve-everything standard that promises interoperability but only delivers pain and misery. Since each country has its own standards for person and account identification, in dealing with these local realities, the ISO20022 adds quite a lot of complexity. But all this cost does not result in interoperability. In fact, each payment scheme end up with a localized version of the standard, incompatible with others. What could have been a clean API, ends up a mess.
What alternative do you suggest? Keeping in mind all the parties that will be involved, besides your project.
Create a fit to purpose, simpler, protocol using a good interface specification language (OpenAPI or protocol buffers). Maybe borrow concepts and patterns from the ISO standard, but not adopt it. It will not deliver its promise of interoperability. It might actually make it harder to interoperate with other payment schemes.
Interledger Protocol (ILP, ILPv4).
Interledger Architecture:
https://interledger.org/rfcs/0001-interledger-architecture/#... :
> For purposes of Interledger, we call all settlement systems ledgers. These can include banks, blockchains, peer-to-peer payment schemes, automated clearing house (ACH), mobile money institutions, central-bank operated real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, and even more.
[...]
> Interledger provides for secure payments across multiple assets on different ledgers. The architecture consists of a conceptual model for interledger payments, a mechanism for securing payments, and a suite of protocols that implement this design.
> The Interledger Protocol (ILP) is the core of the Interledger protocol suite. Colloquially, the whole Interledger stack is sometimes referred to as "ILP". Technically, however, the Interledger Protocol is only one layer in the stack.
> Interledger is not a blockchain, a token, nor a central service. Interledger is a standard way of bridging financial systems. The Interledger architecture is heavily inspired by the Internet architecture described in RFC 1122, RFC 1123 and RFC 1009.
[...]
> You can envision the Interledger as a graph where the points are individual nodes and the edges are accounts between two parties. Parties with only one account can send or receive through the party on the other side of that account. Parties with two or more accounts are connectors, who can facilitate payments to or from anyone they're connected to.
> Connectors [AKA routers] provide a service of forwarding packets and relaying money, and they take on some risk when they do so. In exchange, connectors can charge fees and derive a profit from these services. In the open network of the Interledger, connectors are expected to compete among one another to offer the best balance of speed, reliability, coverage, and cost.
ILP > Peering, Clearing and Settling: https://interledger.org/rfcs/0032-peering-clearing-settlemen...
ILP > Simple Payment Setup Protocol (SPSP): https://interledger.org/rfcs/0009-simple-payment-setup-proto...
> This document describes the Simple Payment Setup Protocol (SPSP), a basic protocol for exchanging payment information between payee and payer to facilitate payment over Interledger. SPSP uses the STREAM transport protocol for condition generation and data encoding.
> (Introduction > Motivation) STREAM does not specify how payment details, such as the ILP address or shared secret, should be exchanged between the counterparties. SPSP is a minimal protocol that uses HTTPS for communicating these details.
[...]
GET /.well-known/pay HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Accept: application/spsp4+json, application/spsp+jsonShrinking deep learning’s carbon footprint
"Unlearning" is one algorithmic approach that may yield substantial energy consumption gains.
With many deep learning models, it's not possible to determine when or from what source something was learned: it's not possible to "back out" a change to the network and so the whole model has to be re-trained from scratch; which is O(n) instead of O(1.x).
The article covers software approaches (more energy-efficient algorithms) and mentions GPUs but not TPUs or ASICs.
Specialized chips (built with dynamic fabrication capacities) are far more energy efficient for specific types of workloads. We see this with mining ASICs, SSL accelerators, and also with Tensor Processing Units (for deep learning).
The externalities of energy production are the ultimate concern. If you're using cheap, clean energy with minimized external costs ("sustainable energy"), the energy-efficiency of the algorithm and the chips is of much less concern.
Could we recognize products, services, and data centers that were produced with and/or run on directly sourced clean energy as "200% Green"; with a logo on the box and/or the footer? 100% offset by PPAs is certainly progress.
Show HN: Starboard – Fully in-browser literate notebooks like Jupyter Notebook
Hi HN, I developed Starboard over the past months.
Cell-by-cell notebooks like Jupyter are great for prototyping, explaining and exploration, but their dependence on a Python server (with often undocumented dependencies) limits their ability to be shared and remixed. Now that browsers support dynamic imports, it has become possible to create a similar workflow entirely in the browser.
That motivated me to build Starboard Notebook, a tool I wished existed. It's:
* Run entirely in the browser, there is no server or setup, it's all static files.
* Web-native, so no widget system is necessary. There is nearly no magic, it's all web tech (HTML, CSS, JS).
* Stores as a plaintext file, it will play nicely with version control systems.
* Hackable: the sandbox that your code gets run in contains the editor itself, so you can metaprogram the editor itself (e.g. adding support for other languages such as Python through WASM).
* Open source (https://github.com/gzuidhof/starboard-notebook).
You can import any code that targets the browser directly (e.g. puts stuff on the window object), or that has exports in ES module format.
I'm happy to answer any questions!
Neat! There's a project called Jyve that compiles Jupyter Lab to WASM (using iodide). https://github.com/deathbeds/jyve There are kernels for JS, CoffeeScript, Brython, TypeScript, and P5. FWIU, the kernels are marked as unsafe because, unfortunately, there seems to be no good way to sandbox user-supplied notebook code from the application instance. The README describes some of the vulnerabilities that this entails.
The jyve project issues discuss various ideas for repacking Python packages beyond the set already included with Pyodide and supporting loading modules from remote sources.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres... : "Subresource Integrity (SRI) is a security feature that enables browsers to verify that resources they fetch (for example, from a CDN) are delivered without unexpected manipulation. It works by allowing you to provide a cryptographic hash that a fetched resource must match."
There's a new Native Filesystem API: "The new Native File System API allows web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user's device." https://web.dev/native-file-system/
We'll need a way to grant specific URLs specific, limited amounts of storage.
https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide :
> The Python scientific stack, compiled to WebAssembly
> [...] Pyodide brings the Python 3.8 runtime to the browser via WebAssembly, along with the Python scientific stack including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, parts of SciPy, and NetworkX. The packages directory lists over 35 packages which are currently available.
> Pyodide provides transparent conversion of objects between Javascript and Python. When used inside a browser, Python has full access to the Web APIs.
https://github.com/deathbeds/jyve/issues/46 :
> Would miniforge and conda-forge build a WASM architecture target?
> Emscripten or WASI?
Ask HN: Learning about distributed systems?
I used to love Operating Systems during my undergrads, Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum is till date the only academic book I've read entirely. I recently read an article about how Amazon built Aurora by Werner Vogels and I was captivated by it. I want to start reading about Distributed Systems. What would be a good start/Road Map?
The book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppman is a fantastic read with such a concise train of thought. It builds up from basics, adds another thing, and another thing.
I kept asking myself, what would happen if I were to extend on the feature currently presented in the chapter I was reading, only to find out my answers in the next chapter.
Brilliant book
> "Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppman: https://dataintensive.net/ https://g.co/kgs/xJ73FS
From a previous question re: "Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15778396 and distributed systems we eventually realize were needed in the first place:
> Bulk Synchronous Parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel .
Many/most (?) distributed systems can be described in terms of BSP primitives.
> Paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) .
> Raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) #Safety
> CAP theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem .
Papers-we-love > Distributed Systems: https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/tree/master...
awesome-distributed-systems also has many links to theory: https://github.com/theanalyst/awesome-distributed-systems
- Byzantine fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault :
> A [Byzantine fault] is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals Problem",[2] developed to describe a situation in which, in order to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.
awesome-bigdata lists a number of tools: https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-bigdata
Practically, dask.distributed (joblib -> SLURM,), dask ML, dask-labextension (a JupyterLab extension for dask), and the Rapids.ai tools (e.g. cuDF) scale from one to many nodes.
Not without a sense of irony, as the lists above list many papers that could be readings with quizzes,
Distributed systems -> Distributed computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing
Category: Distributed computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Distributed_computing
Category:Distributed_computing_architecture : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Distributed_computing...
DLT: Distributed Ledger Technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger
Consensus (computer science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)
Ask HN: How can I “work-out” critical thinking skills as I age?
As I get older, I realized I’m not as sharp as I used to be. Maybe it’s from the fatigue of juggling 2 kids, but I’m very ill prepared for interviews because I simply can’t answer “product questions” and brain teasers. It’s a skill I need, and truthfully I was never good at consultant type questions to begin with but I’m seeing a lot of these questions in Data Science interviews.
Any help or resources will be tremendously appreciated.
Problem solving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving
Critical thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
Computational Thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking
> 1. Problem formulation (abstraction);
> 2. Solution expression (automation);
> 3. Solution execution and evaluation (analyses).
Interviewers may be more interested in demonstrating problem solving methods and f thinking aloud than an actual solution in an anxiety-producing scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_(website) ;
> Brilliant offers guided problem-solving based courses in math, science, and engineering, based on National Science Foundation research supporting active learning.[14]
Coding Interview University: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Programmer Competency Matrix: https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
Inference > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference
- Deductive reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning
- Inductive reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning
> This is the [open] textbook for the Foundations of Data Science class at UC Berkeley: "Computational and Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science" http://inferentialthinking.com/
The tragedy of FireWire: Collaborative tech torpedoed by corporations
Due to DMA (Direct Memory Access) in most implementations, IEEE 1394 ("FireWire") can be used to directly read from and write to RAM.
See: IEEE 1394 > Security issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Security_issues
FWIU, USB 3 is faster than FireWire; there are standard, interchangeable USB connectors and adapters; and USB implementations do not use DMA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0
> FWIU, USB 3 is faster than FireWire
You've missed the point. The title of the article reads "The tragedy of FireWire" - how a good standard was victimized due to corporate politics. FireWire was 10 years ahead of USB. In 2002, FireWire 800 provided a data rate of 800 Mbps, full-duplex. On the other hand, USB 2 only had 480 Mbps, half-duplex. USB didn't catch up until 2010, after USB 3.0 was released. FireWire uses 30 V, 1.5 A power, and it supports power delivery up to 45 watts. USB didn't offer anything similar, not even the latest USB 3, until 2014 after Power Delivery and Type-C's standardization - and real applications only started to ramp up by ~2017. Both limitations of USB 2 were detrimental to some applications, e.g. using hard drives on a PC was painful due to speed and power constraints, had FireWire became more common, it would not be an issue. FireWire can also do everything Ethernet can do (in fact, 1394b's signaling is better than 100Base-TX Ethernet, and has lower radiation), networking is natively supported, you can network two computers together directly with a 1394 cable! On USB, it's only possible using an external controller. One application was NAS, a hard drive can be shared directly over 1394, and mounted as a local drive. Not possible with USB. Finally, 1394b does not have USB's 5-meter limitation due to protocol timing, and natively supports signaling over CAT-5 and fiber optics cable for a distance of ~50-100 meters - on USB, it requires a media converter running vendor-specific custom protocols and not interoperable. All of these features are standardized in 2004 in IEEE 1394b.
Of course, limitations are not inherently USB 2's failures, they have different applications, FireWire was more expensive, and USB's goal was low-cost. But the tragedy was that bad business decision prevented FireWire to achieve its full potential, slowly fading out, and eventually became irrelevant after USB 3 despite its initial good engineering.
FireWire was a tragedy.
> Due to DMA (Direct Memory Access) in most implementations, IEEE 1394 ("FireWire") can be used to directly read from and write to RAM.
This is why we need IOMMU.
You should not blame IEEE 1394 for DMA attacks just because it supports DMA. I agree that the tragedy of FireWire probably prevented a common PC exploit vector as an lucky unintentional consequence, but it's just a symptom, not the actual issue - and the symptom has came back in another form.
Most sufficiently fast hardware interfaces support DMA, and they're equally vulnerable - this includes PCI-E, ExpressCard (which exposes PCI-E), USB 4 (which exposes PCI-E port), Thunderbolt (which exposes PCI-E). Practical exploits are already widespread, not limited to arbitrary memory reads/writes, but also OptionROM arbitrary code execution if a Thunderbolt device is plugged in at boot time.
And this is not only a problem for external ports like 1394, USB 4 or Thunderbolt. Threats also exist from internal devices, like a Ethernet or Wi-Fi controller on the motherboard. While you cannot initiate a DMA transaction via Ethernet (without RDMA) or Wi-Fi since they don't expose PCI-E, the fact that those are connected directly to PCI-E implies any vulnerability in the controller firmware potentially allows an attacker to launch a DMA attack. Exploits already exist for Wi-Fi controllers.
This is the real problem. While the mechanism of IOMMU exists, CPU manufacturers and operating systems previously did little to systematically protect the system from DMA. In the past, Intel intentionally removed IOMMU functionality from low-end CPUs and motherboard chipsets in order to sell more Xeon CPUs to enterprise users. Also, while IOMMU is supported by operating systems, kernel code and drivers were not systematic audited for security - serious IOMMU bypass vulnerabilities have been previously discovered (and patched) in macOS and Linux's IOMMU implementations.
With continued proliferation of USB 4 and Thunderbolt, the lack of IOMMU and buggy driver implementation will become a bigger problem.
So far, QubesOS is most most protected operating system from DMA attacks. Untrusted hardware are assigned to a dedicated VM, and IOMMU is enforced by the hypervisor, not the individual device drivers in operating systems. Compromising a device driver in an untrusted domain does not directly expose the rest of QubesOS to attackers.
> and USB implementations do not use DMA.
USB 4 does now.
So your argument is that not security but cost is the reason that USB "won" the external device interface competition with FireWire?
Good to know that USB4 implementations are making the same mistake as FireWire implementors did in choosing performance over security . Unfortunately it looks like there will be no alternative except for maybe to use a USB3 hub (or an OS with fuzzed IOMMU and also controller firmwares)?
Could an NX bit for data coming from buses with and without DMA help at all?
Hot gluing external ports now seems a bit more rational and justified for systems where physical access is less controlled.
> So your argument is that not security, but cost is the reason that USB "won" the external device interface competition with FireWire?
Sorry, but I heavily suspect that you didn't read the original article and I suggest you to do so.
Security has nothing to do with 1394's market adoption, in the 2010s, some desktops still have 1394, and some laptops still have ExpressCard, and you don't see anyone complains about security, only some security researchers.
The reason was partially cost, but also a bad business decision by Steve Jobs, which made Intel and Microsoft stopped their efforts for pushing 1394, largely damaged it before it even got a chance for wider adoption.
> FireWire's principal creator, Apple, nearly killed it before it could appear in a single device. And eventually the Cupertino company effectively did kill FireWire, just as it seemed poised to dominate the industry.
> Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWire into its chipsets—and instead throw its weight behind USB 2.0.
> Sirkin believes that Microsoft could have reversed the new licensing policy by citing the prior signed agreement. "Microsoft must have thrown it away," he speculated, because it would have "stopped Apple in its tracks."*
--
> Good to know that USB4 implementations are making the same mistake as FireWire implementors did in choosing performance over security.
DMA is optional and can be disabled.
Speaking of usability, DMA is limited to the Thunderbolt part (which is ultimately the PCI-E part) of USB 4 standard. You don't have to use USB 4's PCI-E. Unless the USB device really needs PCI-E, like RAID storage box or a GPU, disabling DMA is not a problem. Requiring explicit user consent for PCI-E is also a solution, operating systems already does it for Thunderbolt devices. Same treatment can be applied to USB 4.
And again, calling out DMA support is only shooting the messenger while ignoring the underlying problem. DMA is essential for any high-performance system bus, and it can a problem regardless of who supported it, or whether it's connected to an external port. A Wi-Fi controller handles untrusted data, but despite being an internal device on the motherboard, it's still potentially an exploit vector for DMA attackers.
> (or an OS with fuzzed IOMMU and also controller firmwares)
Only IOMMU is needed (and possibly a good driver, but not strictly required, see QubesOS). If your IOMMU is good, you don't have to trust firmware or hardware, since arbitrary DMAs are blocked by IOMMU, just like how memory protection (MMU) works but for I/O. Memory spaces are isolated.
The IOMMU vulnerabilities I previous mentioned are already patched, and a complete bypass of IOMMU is unlikely to occur in the future. Driver bugs are still an issue, more RAM regions can be exposed by drivers than what's really needed, and potentially you can pretend to be any hardware and feed bad data to trick the most vulnerable driver to expose more RAM regions, and I expect to see more bugs.
Turn on IOMMU, and apply OS patches often, and you'll probably be fine.
I read much of the article (which assumed that "FireWire" failed because of issues with suppliers failing to work together instead of waning demand (due in part to corporate customers' knowledge of the security risks of most implementations)).
Thanks for the info on USB-4, DMA, IOMMU.
IOMMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_memory_ma...
Looks like there are a number of iommu Linux kernel parameters: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/kernel-pa...
Wonder what the defaults are and what the comparable parameters are for common consumer OSes.
Looks like NX bit support is optional in IOMMUs.
Can I configure the amount of RAM allocated to this?
> Wonder what the defaults
See the Thunderclap FAQ, most of your questions are explained. Thunderclap is the DMA attack on Thunderbolt, and everything should be applicable to USB 4 as well, since USB 4 incorporated Thunderbolt directly.
From the FAQ,
> In macOS 10.12.4 and later, Apple addressed the specific network card vulnerability we used to achieve a root shell. However the general scope of our work still applies; in particular that Thunderbolt devices have access to all network traffic and sometimes keystrokes and framebuffer data.
> Microsoft have enabled support for the IOMMU for Thunderbolt devices in Windows 10 version 1803, which shipped in 2018. Earlier hardware upgraded to 1803 requires a firmware update from the vendor. This brings them into line with the baseline for our work, however the more complex vulnerabilities we describe remain relevant.
> Recently, Intel have contributed patches to version 5.0 of the Linux kernel (shortly to be released) that enable the IOMMU for Thunderbolt and prevent the protection-bypass vulnerability that uses the ATS feature of PCI Express.
But note that Microsoft says on its website,
> This feature does not protect against DMA attacks via 1394/FireWire, PCMCIA, CardBus, ExpressCard, and so on.
Basically, IOMMU is enabled by default in most systems now. However, only on Thunderbolt devices (and USB 4 devices, since Thunderbolt is now its subset). But not on other PCI-E ports, such as the internal PCI-E ports, or external ones like 1394 or ExpressCard. I think it's due to fears of performance and compatibility issues, there's no reason why it cannot be implemented if one insists. Also, from the macOS example, you see that bad drivers can be a problem, even with IOMMU, if a driver is bad, attackers can exploit them and trick them to give more RAM access (If my memory is correct, Linux's implementation was better, but since it's an early FAQ, I don't know if macOS has improved).
> what the comparable parameters are for common consumer OSes.
On the Linux kernel, with an Intel CPU, the kernel option "intel_iommu=on" will enable IOMMU completely for everything, internal and external, which is the most ideal option. You should see
DMAR: IOMMU enabled
IOMMU needs support from the CPU and motherboard chipset, Intel's IOMMU is called VT-D and marketed it as I/O virtualization for virtual machines. Most i3, i5, and i7 CPUs are supported. You may need to turn it on in BIOS if there's an option. It should work on most laptops, even an old Ivy Bridge laptop should work - which is good news, laptops are the most vulnerable platform. Unfortunately, on desktops, Intel intentionally removed IOMMU from high-end CPUs preferred by PC enthusiasts in the 1st (Nehalem), 2nd (Sandy Bridge), 3rd (Ivy Bridge), and 4th (Haswell) generations, possibly as a strategy to sell more Xeon chips to enterprise virtualization users (likely in line with their cripple-ECC strategy). Most high-end overclockable K-series CPUs have their IOMMU removed, while the non-K counterparts are supported. Also, in these generations, some motherboard chipsets are crippled and don't have IOMMU. Fortunately, Intel no longer does it since 5/6th gen (Broadwell/Skylake) CPUs.
No experience on AMD yet, but it should be similar. I think possibly better, my impression is that AMD doesn't intentional crippling IOMMU or ECC like Intel does (a nasty strategy...). Check the docs.
The Developer’s Guide to Audit Logs / SIEM
This article suggests that there should be separate data collection systems for: analytics, SIEM logs, and performance metrics.
The article mentions the CEF (Common Event Format) standard but not syslog or GELF or other JSON formats.
[ArcSight] Common Event Format [PDF]: https://kc.mcafee.com/resources/sites/MCAFEE/content/live/CO...
GELF: Graylog Extended Log Format: https://docs.graylog.org/en/latest/pages/gelf.html
Wikipedia > Syslog lists a few limitations of Syslog (no message delivery confirmation, though there is a reliable delivery RFC; and insufficient payload standardization) and also links to the existing Syslog RFCs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog
Are push-style systems ideal for security logshipping systems? What sort of a message broker is ideal? AMQP has reliable delivery; while, for example, ZeroMQ does not and will drop messages due to resource exhaustion.
Developers simply need an API for their particular framework to non-blockingly queue and then log structs to a remote server. This typically means moving beyond a single-threaded application architecture so that the singular main [green] thread is not blocked when the remote log server is not responding.
SIEM: Security information and event management: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_information_and_event...
Del.icio.us
The Firefox (and Chromium) bookmarks storage and sync systems still don't persist tags!
"Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916
Notes re: how this could be standardized with JSON-LD: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916#c116
The existing Web Experiment for persisting bookmark tags: https://github.com/azappella/webextension-experiment-tags/bl...
Ask HN: Recommendations for Books on Writing?
I want to propose a book club for writing as an engineer. Writing is fundamentally and critically important, but it seems that we don't emphasize it as much as we should for engineers (outside Amazon, where apparently it is a prominent member of the leadership pantheon).
I'm interested in any suggestions that HN has for great books on writing as an engineer! Accessibility and ease are important factors for a book club as well.
Technical Writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writing
Google Technical Writing courses (1 & 2) and resources: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing :
- Google developer documentation style guide: https://developers.google.com/style
- Microsoft Writing Style Guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/
Season of Docs is a program where applicants write documentation for open source projects: https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/
Many open source projects are happy to accept necessary contributions of docs and editing; but do keep in mind that maintaining narrative documentation can be far more burdensome than maintaining API documentation that's kept next to the actual code. Systems like doxygen, epidoc, javadoc, and sphinx-apidoc enable developers to generate API documentation for a particular version of the software project as one or more HTML pages.
ReadTheDocs builds documentation from ReStructuredText and now also Markdown sources using Sphinx and the ReadTheDocs Docker image. ReadTheDocs organizes docs with URLs of the form <projectname>.rtfd.io/<language>/<version|latest>: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ . The ReadTheDocs URL scheme reduces the prevalence of broken external links to documentation; though authors are indeed free to delete and rename docs pages and change which VCS tags are archived with RTD.
Write the Docs is a conference for technical documentation authors which is supported in part by ReadTheDocs: https://www.writethedocs.org/
Write the Docs > Learning Resources > All our videos and articles: https://www.writethedocs.org/topics/ :
> This page links to the topics that have been covered by conference talks or in the newsletter.
You might say that UX (User Experience) includes UI design and marketing: the objective is to imagine yourself as a customer experiencing the product or service afresh.
Writing dialogue is an activity we often associate more with creative writing exercises; where the objective is to meditate upon compassion for others.
One must imagine themself as ones/people/persons who interact with the team.
Cognitive walkthrough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_walkthrough
The William Golding, Jung, and Joseph Campbell books on screenwriting, archetypes, and the hero's journey monomyth are excellent; if you're looking for creative writing resources.
Ask HN: How did you learn x86-64 assembly?
I'm an experienced C/C++ programmer and I occasionally look at the generated assembly to check for optimizations, loop unrolling, vectorization, etc. I understand what's going on the surface level, but I have a hard time understand what's going on in detail, especially with high optimization levels, where the compiler would do all kinds of clever tricks. I experiment with code in godbolt.org and look up the various opcodes, but I would like to take a more structured way of learning x86-64 assembly, especially when it comes to common patterns, tips and tricks, etc.
Are there any good books or tutorials you can recommend which go beyond the very beginner level?
High Level Assembly (HLA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Level_Assembly
> HLA was originally conceived as a tool to teach assembly language programming at the college-university level. The goal is to leverage students' existing programming knowledge when learning assembly language to get them up to speed as fast as possible. Most students taking an assembly language programming course have already been introduced to high-level control flow structures, such as IF, WHILE, FOR, etc. HLA allows students to immediately apply that programming knowledge to assembly language coding early in their course, allowing them to master other prerequisite subjects in assembly before learning how to code low-level forms of these control structures. The book The Art of Assembly Language Programming by Randall Hyde uses HLA for this purpose
Web: https://plantation-productions.com/Webster/
Book: "The Art of Assembly Language Programming" https://plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/
Portable, Opensource, IA-32, Standard Library: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hla-stdlib/
"12.4 Programming in C/C++ and HLA" in the Linux 32 bit edition: https://plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/...
... A chapter(s) about wider registers, WASM, and LLVM bitcode etc might be useful?
... Many awesome lists link to OllyDbg and other great resources for ASM; like such as ghidra: https://www.google.com/search?q=ollydbg+site%3Agithub.com+in...
Brain connectivity levels are equal in all mammals, including humans: study
This is outrageously misleading. To make a claim about the number of synapses between neurons based on MRI data is completely unwarranted. Voxel size (single volumetric pixel) in MRI is approximately 1mm, while synapse size is way less than a micron. You need resolution per pixel on the order of 10s of nanometers to identify synapses.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a dead salmon also has “equal” connectivity: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
Surely there's something to learn here though. I haven't read the original paper but a quantity that's preserved across brain scales is either an artifact or a neat insight.
Your criticism reads like someone accusing economists of being outrageously misleading when they don't sample individual households but measure macro indicators. It's like saying Ramon y cajal was ridiculous because he couldn't image the neuropil effectively. Or like saying early optogenetics experiments were ridiculous because who knows if you're stimulating a neuron in a realistic manner?
And in any case, it's true that synapses are comically small relative to voxel size, but we also have some reasonable information about projection patterns and synapse number from various tracer or rabies studies with which you are no doubt familiar.
I haven't read the nature paper the press release is about and I'm not a huge fan of many d/fMRI practices or derived claims. And I've worked with enough mammalian dwi data to be skeptical of specific connection claims. But this strikes me as a rather interesting result even if you can't measure all the synapses at the right resolution: either the tractography method has connectivity conservation artifacts baked in, or there's something interesting going on.
"fNIRS Compared with other neuroimaging techniques" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_near-infrared_spect...
> When comparing and contrasting these devices it is important to look at the temporal resolution, spatial resolution, and the degree of immobility.
I think I missed your overall point?
OP suggests that the spatial resolution of existing MRI neuroimaging capabilities is insufficient to observe or so characterize or so generalize about neuronal activity in mammalian species. fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) is one alternative neuroimaging capability that we could compare fMRI with according to the criteria for comparison suggested in the cited Wikipedia article: "temporal resolution, spatial resolution, and the degree of immobility".
Ask HN: Resources to start learning about quantum computing?
Hi there,
I'm an experienced software engineer (+15 years dev experience, MsC in Computer Science) and quantum computing is the first thing in my experience that is being hard to grasp/understand. I'd love to fix that ;)
What resources would you recommend to start learning about quantum computing?
Ideally resources that touch both the theoretical base and evolve to more practical usages.
"What are some good resources to learn about Quantum Computing?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16052193 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16052193
Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching
Stephen, Jon, and Ashby here, the co-founders of Charityvest (https://charityvest.org). We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits.
We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an “HSA for Charity.” They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt.
Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system.
A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work.
Historically, corporate charitable giving matching programs have been administratively painful to operate. Making payments to charities, maintaining tax records, and doing due diligence on charitable compliance is taxing on HR / finance teams. The necessary software to help has historically been quite expensive and not very useful for employees beyond the matching features.
This is one example of an observation Stephen made after working for years as a philanthropic consultant. Consumer fintech products aren’t built to make great giving experiences for donors. Instead, they are built for buyers — e.g., nonprofits (fundraising) or corporations (gift matching) — without a ton of consideration for the everyday user experience.
A few years back, my wife and I made a commitment to give a portion of our income away every year, and we found it administratively painful to give regularly. The tech that nonprofits typically use hardly inspires generosity — e.g., high fees, poor user flows, and questionable information flow (like tax receipts). Giving platforms try to compensate for poor functionality with bright pictures of happy kids in developing countries, but when the technology is not a good financial experience it puts a damper on things.
Charityvest started when I noticed a particular opportunity with donor-advised funds, which are tax-deductible giving funds recognized by the IRS. They are growing quickly (20% CAGR), but mainly among the high-net worth demographic. We believe they are powerful tools. They enable donors to have a giving portfolio all from one place (on one tax receipt) and have full control over their payment information/frequency, etc. Most of all, they enable a donor to split the decisions of committing to give and supporting a specific organization. Excitement about each of these decisions often strikes at different times for donors—particularly those who desire to give on a budget.
We believe everyone should have their own charitable giving fund no matter their net worth. We’ve created technology that has democratized donor-advised funds.
We also believe good technology should be available for every company, big and small. Employers can offer Charityvest for $2.49 / employee / month subscription, and we charge no fees on any of the giving — charities receive 100% of the money given.
Lastly, we send the program administrator a fun report every month to let them know all the awesome giving their company and its employees did in one dashboard. This info can be leveraged for internal culture or external brand building.
We’re just launching our workplace giving product, but we’ve already built a good portfolio of trusted customers, including Eric Ries’ (author of The Lean Startup) company, LTSE. We’ve particularly seen a number of companies use us as a meaningful part of their corporate decision to join the fight for racial justice in substantive ways.
Our endgame is that the world becomes more generous, starting with the culture of every company. We believe giving is fundamentally good and we want to build technology that encourages more of it by making it more simple and accessible.
You can check out our workplace giving product at (https://charityvest.org/workplace-giving). If you’re interested, we can get your company up and running in 10 minutes. Or, please feel free to forward us on to your HR leadership at your company.
Our giving funds are also available for free for any individual on https://charityvest.org — without gift matching and reporting. We’d invite you to check out the experience. For individuals, we make gifts of cash and stock to any charity fee-free.
Happy to share this with you all, and we’d love to know what you think.
What a great idea!
Are there two separate donations or does it add the company's name after the donor's name? Some way to notify recipients about the low cost of managing a charitable donation match program with your service would be great.
Have you encountered any charitable foundations which prefer to receive cryptoassets? Red Cross and UNICEF accept cryptocurrency donations for the children, for example.
Do you have integration with other onboarding and HR/benefits tools on your roadmap? As a potential employee, I would like to work for a place that matches charitable donations, so mentioning as much in job descriptions would be helpful.
Thanks! Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they go together.
We haven't yet encountered any charity that prefers to receive cryptoassets.
We have lots of dreams about thoughtful integrations with HR software, but we want the experience to be excellent, and we want to keep the experience of our existing app excellent. We'll be balancing those priorities as we grow.
> Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they go together.
So the system creates a separate transaction for the original and the matched donation with each donor's name on the respective gift?
How do users sync which elements of their HR information with your service? IDK what the monthly admin cost there is.
There are a few HR, benefits, contracts, and payroll YC companies with privacy regulation compliance and APIs https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=Payroll
https://founderkit.com/people-and-recruiting/health-insuranc...
Separate data records, yes, separate payment, no. The charity receives one consolidated check in the mail each month across all donors (one payment), and the original donor's grant will be on the data sheet as well as the matching grant from the company's corporate fund (separate records).
Today, users create their accounts directly with our app, and they are affiliated with their corporation in our app via their email address. So we don't integrate with any HR information.
Administrators of the program can add and remove employees via copying and pasting email addresses (can add/remove many at a time). We aim to integrate with HR systems of record in the future to make this seamless.
Thanks for clarifying.
Do you offer a CSV containing donor information to the charity?
Do you support anonymous matched donations?
Can donors specify that a donation is strongly recommended for a specific effort?
...
3% * $1000/yr == $2.50/mo * 12mo
CSV: yes if they request we’ll happily provide.
Anonymous: yes it’s an option on our grant screen
Specific efforts: yes on the grant screen we enable donors to add a “specific need” they’d like their grant to fund.
:-)
It may be helpful to integrate with charity evaluation services to help donors assess various opportunities to give.
Charity Navigator > Evaluation method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_Navigator#Evaluation_m...
We love the idea of layering in rich information to help donors make informed decisions! We just want to be really thoughtful about the experience. So we plan to get there, it just may take us some time.
We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs
How are the data needs for such a doctoral and post-doctoral evaluation program different from the data needs for https://collegescorecard.ed.gov ?
Data: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
Data documentation: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/
Reviews seem like the biggest need.
“The culture in the X department is terrible, everyone works 80 hours a week and is miserable”
“Night life is great at least, the grad students usually go out for student nights at blah blah after seminar”
“Underrated X program because at university Y, don’t be fooled we literally have 4 of the 5 top researchers in field Z”
Etc.
But it is so hard for people to give reviews. People seem to give good review when are they are very pissed off or very happy. Later seems to be a very rare case.
I have always thought that bad reviews are sufficient for all purposes, and the only reason to even have good reviews is so the reviewees don't feel overly persecuted.
Any product or service will have occasional customers who are either unreasonable or have bad luck. If you have a lot of bad reviews, then as a prospective customer you want to see if all of them fall under the two categories or whether there is a pattern that is relevant to you.
It seems to me that a review database works fine even when all the reviews are bad, and the only regulation it really needs is an effort to prevent one single individual with a vendetta from overwhelming it.
All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization
> Derivatives top the list, estimated at $1 quadrillion or more in notional value according to a variety of unofficial sources.
1 Quadrillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000 (10^15)
Derivative (finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)
Derivatives market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivatives_market :
> The market can be divided into two, that for exchange-traded derivatives and that for over-the-counter derivatives.
Why companies lose their best innovators (2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886158
> Three reasons companies lose their best innovators.
> 1. They fail to recognize and support the innovators
> 2. Innovation becomes a herculean task
> 3. Corporations don’t match rewards with outcomes
While the paragraphs under point 2 do discuss risk and the paragraphs under point 3 do discuss rewards, I'm not sure this article belongs here.
Risk and Reward.
Large corporations are able to pay people by doing things at scale; with sufficient margin at sufficient volume to justify continued investment. Risk is minimized by focusing on ROI.
Startups assume lots of risk and lots of debt and most don't make it. Liquidation preference applies as the startup team adjourns (and maybe open-sources what remains). In a large corporation, that burnt capital is reported to the board (which represents the shareholders) who aren't "gambling" per se. "You win some and you lose some" is across the street; and they don't have foosball and snacks.
How can large organizations (nonprofit, for-profit, governmental) foster intrapreneurial mindsets without just continuing to say "innovation" more times and expecting things to happen? Drink. "Innovators welcome!". Drink water.
"Intrapreneurial." What does that even mean? The employee, within their specialized department, spends resources (time, money, equipment) on something that their superior managers have not allocated funding for because they want: (a) recognition; (b) job security; (c) to save resources such as time and money; (d) to work on something else instead of this wasteful process; (e) more money.
Very few organizations have anything like "20% time". Why was 20% time thrown off the island to a new island where they had room to run? Do they have foosball? Or is the work so fun that they don't even need foosball? Or is it worth long days and nights because the potential return is enough money to retire tomorrow and then work on what?
Step 1. Steal innovators to work on our one thing
Step 2.
Step 3. Profit.
20% Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project
Intrapreneurship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapreneurship
Internal entrepreneur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_entrepreneur
CINO: Chief Innovation Officer / CTIO: Chief Technology Innovation Officer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_innovation_officer
... Is acquiring innovation and bringing it to scale a top-down process? How do we capture creative solutions and then allocate willing and available resources to making that happen?
awesome-ideation-tools: https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools
Powerful AI Can Now Be Trained on a Single Computer
Lots of people are focusing on this being done on a particularly powerful workstation, but the computer described seems to have power at a similar order of magnitude to the many servers which would be clustered together in a more traditional large ML computation. Either those industrial research departments could massively cut costs/increase output by just “magically keeping things in ram,” or these researchers have actually found a way to reduce the computational power that is necessary.
I find the efforts of modern academics to do ML research on relatively underpowered hardware by being more clever about it to be reminiscent of soviet researchers who, lacking anything like the access to computation of their American counterparts, were forced to be much more thorough and clever in their analysis of problems in the hope of making them tractable.
If anything it seems to me that doing the most work under constraint of resources is precisely what intelligence is about. I've always wondered why the consumption of compute resources is itself not treated as a significant part of the 'reward' in ML tasks.
At least if you're taking inspiration from biological systems, it clearly is part of the equation, a really important one even.
Ask HN: Something like Khan Academy but full curriculum for grade schoolers?
Khan Academy continually gets held up as a great resource for online courses across the age spectrum for math related subjects. With the continuing pandemic continuing to grow in the US and schools not really sure how to handle things, the GF and I are looking into other options.
Is there a recommended resource that gives unbiased (as possible) reviews for middle school (7-8th grade) curriculum? Searching these days really doesn't bring up quality, just options one has to comb through.
K12 CS Framework (ACM, Code.org, [...]) https://k12cs.org/
Computing Curricula 2020 (ACM, IEEE,) http://www.cc2020.net/
Official SAT Practice (College Board, Khan Academy) https://www.khanacademy.org/sat
http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development#... (TODO: add link to cc2020 draft)
Programmer Competency Matrix: http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/ , https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/ , https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
Re: Computational thinking https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-15454421
Coding Interview University: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
AutoML-Zero: Evolving Code That Learns
They use evolutionary search [0] to create programs for image classification, specifically 'binary classification tasks extracted from CIFAR-10'. They do it from scratch, though they use a pytorch-ish programming language with differentiation baked in.
Looks like a nice summer intern project.
"AutoML-Zero: Evolving Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch" (2020) https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03384 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11748751662887361...
How does this compare to MOSES (OpenCog/asmoses) or PLN? https://github.com/opencog/asmoses https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%22... (2007)
SymPy - a Python library for symbolic mathematics
SymPy is the best!
In addition to the already-excellent official tutorial https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorial/index.html , I have written a short printable tutorial summary of the functions most useful for students https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd...
For anyone interested in trying SymPy without installing, there is also the online shell https://live.sympy.org/ which works great and allows you to send entire computations as a URL, see for example this comment that links to an important linear algebra calculation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158095
How does it compare to Matlab's symbolic toolbox, aside from not being affordable outside of academia?
NumPy for Matlab users: https://numpy.org/doc/stable/user/numpy-for-matlab-users.htm...
SymPy vs Matlab: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/SymPy-vs.-Matlab
If you then or later need to do distributed ML, it is advantageous to be working in Python. Dask Distributed, Dask-ML, RAPIDS.ai (CuDF), PyArrow, xeus-cling
Good to know: sympy does not use numpy so you can use pypy instead of python.
In my case I got a 7x speedup.
You can however use sympy to convert symbolic expressions to numeric numpy functions, using the "lambdify" feature. It's awesome because it lets you symbolically generate and manipulate a numerical program.
SymEngine https://github.com/symengine/symengine
> SymEngine is a standalone fast C++ symbolic manipulation library. Optional thin wrappers allow usage of the library from other languages, e.g.:
> [...] Python wrappers allow easy usage from Python and integration with SymPy and Sage (the symengine.py repository)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymPy > Related Projects:
> SymEngine: a rewriting of SymPy's core in C++, in order to increase its performance. Work is currently in progress to make SymEngine the underlying engine of Sage too
How does it compare to sage math? I used sage math today and was pleasantly surprised. Even has a latex option. If you name your variables correctly, it even outputs Greek symbols and subscript correctly!
User 29athrowaway mentions in another comment that they use Sympy through Sagemath, so they probably could answer your question best. It sounds like Sympy is a subset of what Sage offers, but I'm not familiar enough with either tool to know.
Ask HN: Are there any messaging apps supporting Markdown?
I'd like to easily send formatted code, and bullet points, etc. through a messaging app without having to resort to a heavy app like Slack.
Mattermost supports CommonMark Markdown: https://docs.mattermost.com/help/messaging/formatting-text.h...
Zulip supports ~CommonMark Markdown: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.h...
Reddit supports Markdown. https://www.reddit.com/wiki/markdown
Discourse now supports CommonMark Markdown.
GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab and Gogs/Gitea support Markdown.
I wouldn't consider Discourse/Reddit/Github/etc. to be a messaging app per se, even if some of those have messaging functionality between users...
I digress on the category definition. Public messaging (without PM or DM features) is still messaging; and often far more useful than trying to forward 1:1 messages in order to bring additional participants onboard.
It's worth noting that GH/BB/GL have all foregone PM features; probably for the better in terms of productivity: messaging @all is likely more productive.
What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture
My father is an ag soil chemist of 50+ years.
I'm an industrial systems eng. w/ a specialty in polymer-textile-fiber engineering. (Mostly useless skillsets in the US now)
Gonna share a few lessons here about agriculture that I try to convey to EECS, econ, Neuroscience, and the web developer crowd.
- You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms
- It takes 10-14 kwh/1000 gallons of water to desalinate. More if it gets periodically polluted at an increasing rate.
- Large majority Agrarian populations exist because the countries are stuck in a purgatory of <1 MWh/capita annum whereby the country doesn't have scaleable nitrogen and steel manufacturing.
- Sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes are some of the highest satiety lowest input to output ratio produce. High efficiency.
- In civilizations where you are at < 1MWh/capita annum - there is not enough electricity to produce tools for farming, steel for roads, and concrete for building things. The end result is that the optimal decision is to have more children to harvest more calories per an acre.
- Property, bankruptcy, and inheritance law have an immense influence on the farmer population of a country.
I remember telling some "ag tech" VCs my insights and offering to introduce my father who has an immense amount of insight on the topic from having grown things for as long as he has....My thoughts were tossed aside.
So you can't grow potatoes vertically? Can you elaborate? Is it a function of physiology, i.e. calorie dense vegetables need far more leaves and supporting stems than can be practically stacked vertically?
I imagine space is a factor, but energy will be a big one as well. Calorie dense foods will likely need more space and energy (light) inputs. Vertical farms are very water efficient, so I don't think that matters much.
Vertical farms make a lot more sense with fresh vegetables like leafy greens that grow quickly, command high prices if grown organically, and benefit from being closer to market.
Potatoes are the exact opposite. If it ever becomes more cost effective to grow corn, wheat, and potatoes in virtual farms then outdoor agriculture is dead. While I don't agree with the article that it will never happen, it might require energy advances like fusion power or drastically higher _rural_ land values and water prices.
Greenhouses make sense long before vertical farming, just look at agriculture in the Netherlands, it's mind boggling how much they produce for such a tiny country.
Can you expand on this?
I get that to store a calorie in a potato I need to supply a calorie of energy from somewhere else.
But why is fusion power required instead of better UV lamps in my vertical farm? (Assuming I had enough electricity to run them)
The total amount of electricity to power those UV lamps should be on par with what the Sun sends to the potatoes fields. Maybe that's the reason for fusion. It didn't do the math.
Actually no not really. Plants only absorb two wavelengths of light. It's currently more efficient to convert sun into solar power via panels and then to light LEDs supplying only the wavelengths that plants use. Despite the seeming inefficiency here, the fact is that plants are even more inefficient at absorbing light not at the right wavelengths than solar panels.
Could one imagine a material that would absorb solar spectrum and emit the preferred frequencies? Something like a polymer one could stretch over fields to get more from the suns rays.
>> "Actually no not really. Plants only absorb two wavelengths of light. It's currently more efficient to convert sun into solar power via panels and then to light LEDs supplying only the wavelengths that plants use. Despite the seeming inefficiency here, the fact is that plants are even more inefficient at absorbing light not at the right wavelengths than solar panels."
> Could one imagine a material that would absorb solar spectrum and emit the preferred frequencies? Something like a polymer one could stretch over fields to get more from the suns rays.
Would you call that a "solar transmitter"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter :
> Generators of radio waves for heating or industrial purposes, such as microwave ovens or diathermy equipment, are not usually called transmitters, even though they often have similar circuits.
Would "absorption spectroscopy" specialists have insight into whether this is possible without solar cells, energy storage, and UV LEDs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectroscopy
(edit) The thermal energy from sunlight (from the FREE radiation from the nuclear reaction at the center of our solar system) is also useful to and necessary for plants. There's probably a passive heat pipe / solar panel cooling solution that could harvest such heat for colder seasons and climates.
Also, UV-C is useful for sanitizing (UVGI) but not really for plant growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradia... :
> UVGI can be coupled with a filtration system to sanitize air and water.
Is that necessary or desirable for plants?
https://www.lumigrow.com/learning-center/blogs/the-definitiv... :
> The light that plants predominately use for photosynthesis ranges from 400–700 nm. This range is referred to as Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) and includes red, blue and green wavebands. Photomorphogenesis occurs in a wider range from approximately 260–780 nm and includes UV and far-red radiation.
Photomorphogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomorphogenesis
PAR: Photosynthetically active radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetically_active_radi...
Grow light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grow_light
Are there bioluminescent e.g. algae which emit PAR and/or UV? Algae can feed off of waste industrial gases.
Bioluminescence > Light production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence#Light_producti...
Biophoton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophoton
Chemiluminescence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemiluminescence
Electrochemiluminescence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemiluminescence
Quantum dot display / "QLED": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot_display
Could be possible? Analyzing the inputs and outputs is useful in natural systems, as well.
Ask HN: What are your go to SaaS products for startups/MVPs?
Looking for some inspiration. Ive done a lot of MVPs/Early-stage apps over the years and I tend to lean on the same SaaS portfolio for mails, text gateways, payment etc, but Im sure Ive missed a few valuable additions.
Here's a few I use: Mails: Mailchimp / Mandrill Payment: Paylike Search: Algolia
https://StackShare.io and https://FounderKit.com are great places to find reviews of SaaS services:
> mails,
https://founderkit.com/growth-marketing/email-marketing/revi...
https://stackshare.io/email-marketing
https://zapier.com/learn/email-marketing/
> text gateways,
https://founderkit.com/apis/sms/reviews
https://stackshare.io/voice-and-sms
> payments
https://founderkit.com/apis/credit-card-processing/reviews
https://stackshare.io/payment-services
Both have categories:
https://stackshare.io/categories
https://founderkit.com/reviews
If you're looking for market/competition research, I'd recommend https://coscout.com as well, for info about companies, funding, competitors, tech stack etc
It's in alpha right now, so you'll have to get in the waitlist, though they're only a few weeks away from launching AFAIK.
Full disclosure: A friend of mine is building this :)
Long term viability of SaaS solutions is definitely worth researching.
Is this something that's going to get acquired and be extinguished?
What are our switching costs?
How do we get our data in a format that can be: read into our data warehouse/lake and imported into an alternate service if necessary in the future?
How does Coscout compare to e.g. Crunchbase, PitchBook (Morningstar), YCharts, AngelList?
Ask HN: Do you read aloud or silently in your minds?
Most times while reading a new topic that I am not familiar with, I tend to read aloud in my mind. Yet that changes based on the content and the way it is written.
When I'm focused, I notice that reading silently helps increase my reading speed and cognition, like everything is flowing in.
Other times I don't seem to understand anything if I'm not reading it aloud in my mind.
Has anyone noticed such a thing and if so can you share any tips or information you've learned about this behavior
Subvocalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
Speed reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading
Ask HN: How do you deploy a Django app in 2020?
Hi. I'm a mid-level software engineer trying to deploy a small (2000 max users) django app to production.
If I Google: How to deploy a Django app. I get 10+ different answers.
Can anyone on HN help me please.
You'll probably get 10 different answers here too.
I use uwsgi in emperor mode. I have a Makefile that runs a few SSH commands on production to clone my git repo at a specific commit, builds a virtual environment from requirements.txt, and atomically swaps a symlink to a uwsgi socket. Nginx in front of it all. It's pretty much the Python equivalent of FTPing HTML files to a web server.
Uwsgi is terrifying because it has so many options (and I wonder how secure it is), but it has never failed me. Packaging and containerizing things sounds cool, but I just can't justify spending time on it when my setup works fine (I'm a solo dev).
If you have only one production server, dokku is "A docker-powered PaaS that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications." Dokku supports Heroku buildpack deployment (buildstep), Procfiles, Dockerfile deployment, Docker image deployment, git deployment (gitreceive), or tarfile deployments. https://github.com/dokku/dokku
There are a number of plugins for Dokku. Dokku ships with the nginx plugin as the HTTP frontend proxy. Dokku supports SSL certs with the certs plugin.
When you need to move to more than one server, what do you do? There's now a dokku-scheduler-kubernetes plugin which can do HA (high availability) which is worth reading about before you develop and document your own deployment workflow. https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes
I also always put build, test, and deployment commands in a Makefile.
Package it; as a container or as containers that install a RPM/DEB/APK/Condapkg/Pythonpkg (possibly containing a zipapp). Zipapps are fast.
If you have any non-python dependencies, a Pythonpkg only solves for part of the packaging needs.
Producing a packaged artifact should be easy and part of your CI build script.
Here's the cookiecutter-django production docker-compose.yml with containers for django, celery, postgres, redis, and traefik as a load balancer: https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django/blob/master/%...
Cookiecutter-django also includes a Procfile.
With k8s, you have an ingress (~load balancer + SSL termination proxy) other than traefik.
You can generate k8s YML from docker-compose.yml with Kompose.
I just found this which describes using GitLab CI with Helm: https://davidmburke.com/2020/01/24/deploy-django-with-helm-t...
What is the command to scale up or down? Do you need a geodistributed setup (on multiple providers' clouds)? Who has those credentials and experience?
How do you do red/green or rolling deployments?
Can you run tests in a copy of production?
Can you deploy when the tests that run on git commit pass?
What runs the database migrations in production; while users are using the site?
If something deletes the whole production setup or the bus factor is 1, how long does it take to redeploy from zero; and how much manual work does it take?
CI + Ansible + Terraform + Kubernetes.
Whatever tools you settle on, django-eviron for a 12 Factor App may be advisable. https://github.com/joke2k/django-environ
The Twelve-Factor App: https://12factor.net/
Containers from first principles
I recently discovered systemd-nspawn and was amazed at how lightweight a basic container can be.
"Docker Without Docker" (2015) explains /sbin/init and systemd-nspawn. Systemd did not exist when docker was first created. https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without-docker/
That's not what I remember. Wikipedia backs up that recollection as well [0], marking systemd's initial release in 2010. Docker's initial release is listed as 2013 [1]. Maybe that was true of the dotCloud internal releases, and certainly, not all of the EL and other Linux distros had not adopted systemd during 2010 - 2013. Certainly after 2014 or 2015, systemd had spread to the major Linux distros so Docker could have chosen to take a systemd-based approach at that point.
Are there other systemd + containers solutions?
"Chapter 4. Running containers as Systemd services with Podmam" https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
AFAIU, when running containers with systemd:
- logs go to journald by default
- there's no docker-compose for just the [name-prefixed] containers in the docker-compose.yml,
- you can use systemd unit template parametrization
- it's not as easy to collect metrics on every container on the system without a read-only docker socket: how many containers are running, how much RAM quota are they assigned and utilizing? What are the filesystem and port mappings?
- you can run containers as non-root
- you can run containers in systemd timer units
- you use runC to handle seccomp
... You can do cgroups and namespaces with just systemd; but keeping chroots/images upgraded is outside the scope of systemd: where is the ideal boundary between systemd and containers?
See this comment regarding per-container MAC MCS labels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23430959
There's much additional complexity that justifies k8s / OpenShift: when would I want to manage containers with just systemd units?
> Many people might think the word “container” has a specific meaning within the Linux kernel; however the kernel has no notion of a “container”. The word has been synonymous with a variety of Linux tooling which when applied give the resemblance of what we expect a container to be.
Before LXC ( https://LinuxContainers.org ) and CNCF ( https://landscape.cncf.io/ ) and OCI ( https://opencontainers.org/ ), for shared-kernel VPS hosting ("virtual private server"; root on a shared box), there was OpenVZ (which requires a patched kernel and AFAIU still has features, like bursting, not present in cgroups).
Docker no longer has an LXC driver: libcontainer (opencontainers/runc) is the story now. The LXC docs have a great list of utilized kernel features that's also still true for docker-engine = runC + moby. The LXC docs: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/introduction/ :
> Current LXC uses the following kernel features to contain processes:
> ## Kernel namespaces (ipc, uts, mount, pid, network and user)
>> Namespaces are a feature of the Linux kernel that partitions kernel resources such that one set of processes sees one set of resources while another set of processes sees a different set of resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_namespaces
> ## Apparmor and SELinux profiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux
udica is an interesting tool for creating SELinux policies for containers.
Is it possible for each container to run confined with a different SELinux label?
> ## Seccomp policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp
See below re: Seccomp.
> ## Chroots (using pivot_root) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot
Chroots and symlinks, Chroots and bind mounts, Chroots and overlay filesystems, Chroots and SELinux context labels.
FWIU, Chroots are a native feature of filesystem syscalls in Fuchsia.
> ## Kernel capabilities
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Capabilities :
>> "Capabilities (POSIX 1003.1e, capabilities(7)) provide fine-grained control over superuser permissions, allowing use of the root user to be avoided. Software developers are encouraged to replace uses of the powerful setuid attribute in a system binary with a more minimal set of capabilities. Many packages make use of capabilities, such as CAP_NET_RAW being used for the ping binary provided by iputils. This enables e.g. ping to be run by a normal user (as with the setuid method), while at the same time limiting the security consequences of a potential vulnerability in ping."
> ## CGroups (control groups)* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups
Control groups enable per-process (and to thus per-container) resource quotas. Other than limiting the impact of resource exhaustion, cgroups are not a security feature of the Linux kernel.
Here's a helpful explainer of the differences between some of these kernel features; which, combined, have become somewhat ubiquitous:
From "Formally add support for SELinux" (k3s #1372) https://github.com/rancher/k3s/issues/1372#issuecomment-5817... :
> https://blog.openshift.com/securing-kubernetes/*
>> The main thing to understand about SELinux integration with OpenShift is that, by default, OpenShift runs each container as a random uid and is isolated with SELinux MCS labels. The easiest way of thinking about MCS labels is they are a dynamic way of getting SELinux separation without having to create policy files and run restorecon.*
>> If you are wondering why we need SELinux and namespaces at the same time, the way I view it is namespaces provide the nice abstraction but are not designed from a security first perspective. SELinux is the brick wall that’s going to stop you if you manage to break out of (accidentally or on purpose) from the namespace abstraction.
>> CGroups is the remaining piece of the puzzle. Its primary purpose isn’t security, but I list it because it regulates that different containers stay within their allotted space for compute resources (cpu, memory, I/O). So without cgroups, you can’t be confident your application won’t be stomped on by another application on the same node.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp ::
> seccomp (short for secure computing mode) is a computer security facility in the Linux kernel. seccomp allows a process to make a one-way transition into a "secure" state where it cannot make any system calls except exit(), sigreturn(), read() and write() to already-open file descriptors. Should it attempt any other system calls, the kernel will terminate the process with SIGKILL or SIGSYS.[1][2] In this sense, it does not virtualize the system's resources but isolates the process from them entirely.
... SELinux is one implementation of MAC (Mandatory Access Controls) that is built upon the LSM (Linux Security Modules) support in the Linux kernel. Some distros include policy sets for Docker hosts and lots of other packages that could be installed; see: "Formally add support for SELinux" (k3s #1372) https://github.com/rancher/k3s/issues/1372#issuecomment-5817...
How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
> The potential energy of the pyramid—the energy needed to lift the mass above ground level—is simply the product of acceleration due to gravity, mass, and the center of mass, which in a pyramid is one-quarter of its height. The mass cannot be pinpointed because it depends on the specific densities of the Tura limestone and mortar that were used to build the structure; I am assuming a mean of 2.6 metric tons per cubic meter, hence a total mass of about 6.75 million metric tons. That means the pyramid’s potential energy is about 2.4 trillion joules.
In "Lost Technologies of the Great Pyramid" (2010) and "The Great Pyramid Prosperity Machine: Why the Great Pyramid was Built!" (2011), Steven Myers contends that the people who built the pyramids were master hydrologists who built a series of locks from the Nile all the way up the sides of the pyramids and pumped water up to a pool of water on the topmost level; where they used buoyancy and mechanical leverage by way of a floating barge crane in order to place blocks. This would explain how and why the pyramids are water tight, why explosive residue has been found in specific chambers, and why boats have been found buried at the bases of the pyramids.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0045Y26CC/
There are videos: http://www.thepump.org/video-series-2
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt_DvKGJ_QLYvJ3IdVKXU...
I'm not aware of other explanations for how friction could have been overcome in setting the blocks such that they are watertight (in the later Egyptian pyramids).
AFAIU, the pyramids of South America appear to be of different - possibly older - construction methods.
Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap
Power markets are more complicated than most people realize. One thing to note is that solar power can be cheaper than gas, but still not be economic. The fact of the matter is that an intermittent kWh is not as valuable as an on-demand reliable kWh to a utility who's number 1 priority is reliability. Even as solar is acquired at lower and lower prices, if evening power is generated by expensive and inefficient gas turbines, the customer might not see costs go down (and emissions might not go down either!). Solar is clearly economic in many markets, but we'll never get grid emissions in a place like California down much more without storage.
As mentioned in the article, solar power is insanely cheap. So while you are right that a kWh of solar is not, on average, as valuable as a kWh of semidispatchable coal, the insane cheapness means that at some point, it is economical to massively overbuild renewable and decommission fossil fuel plants. You provide no evidence for the implausible claim that solar causes emissions to go up: your argument is only that the emissions reducing effect is muted, which may be true.
Also, while storage would be helpful, it is not the only way to enable a renewable transition. Additional transmission is enormously helpful: as the sun goes down on California, the wind is picking up in the Midwest. And don’t forget demand response: if smart thermostats received price signals (maybe we should precool this house...) that would alleviate the evening ramp-up issue.
So I claim we’ll need less storage than “a whole day’s usage”. But the learning curve applies to batteries as well! This storage won’t cost as much anyway.
The whole issue of intermittency is overrated. While a single solar panel might generate intermittently, the solar fleet across a whole state generates more predictably.
I am predicting that grid emissions will come down a lot over the coming decades. Partially I’m predicting the past: they’ve already come down, a lot!
> if smart thermostats received price signals (maybe we should precool this house...) that would alleviate the evening ramp-up issue.
Is there an existing model for retail intraday rates? Would intraday rates be desirable for all market participants?
"Add area for curtailment data?" https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/issues/236...
Demo of an OpenAI language model applied to code generation [video]
So that's basically program synthesis from natural language (ish) specifications (i.e. the comments).
I can see this being a useful tool [1]. However, I don't expect any ability for innovation. At best this is like having an exceptionally smart autocomplete function that can look up code snippets on SO for you (provided those code snippets are no longer than one line).
That's not to say that it can't write new code, that nobody has quite written before in the same way. But in order for a tool like this to be useful it must stick as close as possible to what is expected- or it will slow development down rather than helping it. Which means it can only do what has already been done before.
For instance- don't expect this to come up with a new sorting algorithm, out of the blue, or to be able to write good code to solve a certain problem when the majority of code solving that problem on github happens to be pretty bad.
In other words: everyone can relax. This will not take your job. Or mine.
____________
[1] I apologise to the people who know me and who will now be falling off their chairs. OK down there?
I think you are underselling the potential of a model which deeply understand programming. Imagine combining such a model with something like AutoML-Zero: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03384 It may not be 'creative', but used as tab-completion, it's not being rewarded or incentivized or used in any way which would expose its abilities towards creating a new sort algorithm.
I agree on the tab-completion part. Something like Gmail's smart-compose could have potentially huge benefits here.
But I'm not sure about the "deeply understand programming" part. Language modelling and "AI", in its current form, uncovers only statistical correlations and barely scratches the surface of what "understanding" is. This has restricted deployment of majority of academic research into the real-world and this, I believe, is no different and will work only in constrained settings.
Edit: typo
It would be nice to have an AI that could write unit tests, or look over your code and understand and explain where you might have bugs.
> look over your code and understand and explain where you might have bugs.
This would certainly be interesting. I'm not aware of active research going on in this area (any pointers would be helpful!).
This would require an agent to have thorough understanding of the logic you're trying to implement, and locate the piece of code where it silently fails. For this you'd again need a training dataset where the input is a piece of code and the supervision signal (the output) is location of the bug. I could imagine some sort of self-supervision to tackle this initially where you'd intentionally introduce bugs in your code to generate training data. But not sure how far this can go!
1. Generate test cases from function/class/method definitions.
2. Generate test cases from fuzz results.
3. Run tests and walk outward from symbols around relevant stacktrace frames (line numbers,).
4. Mutate and run the test again.
...
Model-based Testing (MBT) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing
> Models can also be constructed from completed systems
> At best this is like having an exceptionally smart autocomplete function that can look up code snippets on SO for you (provided those code snippets are no longer than one line).
Yeah, all it could do for you is autocomplete around what it thinks the specification might be at that point in time.
> But what if Andy gets another dinosaur, a mean one? -- Toy Story (1995)
Future of the human climate niche
How many degrees Celsius hotter would that be for billions of people in 50 years?
> The Paris Agreement's long-term temperature goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C, recognizing that this would substantially reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. This should be done by reducing emissions as soon as possible, in order to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" in the second half of the 21st century. It also aims to increase the ability of parties to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, and make "finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development."
> Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming. [6] No mechanism forces [7] a country to set a specific emissions target by a specific date, [8] but each target should go beyond previously set targets.
And then this is what was decided:
> In June 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the agreement. Under the agreement, the earliest effective date of withdrawal for the U.S. is November 2020, shortly before the end of President Trump's 2016 term. In practice, changes in United States policy that are contrary to the Paris Agreement have already been put in place.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
Background: technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset. I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right.
Any suggestions?
(In case it helps an analogue in the mathematical world might be A Mathematician's Apology or Gödel, Escher, Bach.)
Let me sum up all possible books about understanding the "hacker" (terrible word by the way, because of multiple meanings, which meaning are we talking about?) mindset, to a management perspective:
1) True "hackers" value knowledge over money.
2) True "hackers" value doing things once and doing them right, no matter how long that takes. (Compare to the business mindset of "we need it now", or "we needed it yesterday")
3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art.
4) True "hackers" are not about work-arounds. If/when work-arounds are used, it's because there there's an artificial timeframe (as might be found in the corporate world), and there's a lack of understanding in the infrastructure which created the need for that work-around.
But, all of these virtues run counter to the demands of business, which constantly wants more things done faster, cheaper, with more features, more complexity, less testing, and doesn't want to worry about problems that may be caused by all of those things in the future (less accountability) -- as long as customer revenue can be collected today.
You see, a true "hacker's" values -- are completely different than those of big business...
And business people wonder why there's stress and burnout among tech people...
> 3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art
There's something to be said about owning your work, but I have to disagree that unhealthy attachment to work products is a universal attribute of technical founder hackers. It's not a kid, it's a thing that was supposed to be the best use of the resources and information available at the time.
I must have confused this point with vanity and retention in projecting my own counterproductive anti-patterns.
Prolific is not the objective for a true hacker, but not me but a guy I know mentioned something about starting projects and seeing the next 5 years of potentially happily working on that project, too.
Dissecting the code responsible for the Bitcoin halving
> The difficulty of the calculations are determined by how many zeroes need to be at the front. [...]
The difficulty is actually not determined by the number of zeroes (as was initially the case).
https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Difficulty_in_Mining :
> The Bitcoin network has a global block difficulty. Valid blocks must have a hash below this target. Mining pools also have a pool-specific share difficulty setting a lower limit for shares.
"Less than" instead of "count leading zeroes" makes it possible for the difficulty to be less broadly adjusted in a difficulty retargeting.
Difficulty retargetings occur after up to 2016 blocks (~10 minutes, assuming the mining pool doesn't suddenly disappear resulting in longer block times that could make it take months to get to 2016 blocks according to "What would happen if 90% of the Bitcoin miners suddenly stopped mining?" https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/22308/what-would... )
Difficulty is adjusted up or down (every up to 2016 blocks) in order to keep the block time to ~10 minutes.
The block reward halving occurs every ~4 years (210,000 blocks).
Relatedly, Moore's law observes/predicts that processing power (as measured by transistor count per unit) will double every 2 years while price stays the same. Is energy efficiency independent of transistor count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
Ask HN: Does mounting servers parallel with the temperature gradient trap heat?
Heat rises. Is heat trapped in the rack? Would mounting servers sideways (vertically) allow heat to transfer out of the rack?
Many systems have taken the vertical mount approach approach over the years: Blade servers, routers, modems, and various gaming systems.
Horizontally-mounted: parallel with the floor
Vertically-mounted: perpendicular to the floor
[deleted]
Thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics
Are engine cylinders ever mounted horizontally? Why or why not?
> Heat rises.
Warmer air is less dense / more buoyant; so it floats.
"Does hot air really rise?" https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6329/does-hot-ai...
- Water ice floats because – somewhat uniquely – solid water is less dense than liquid water.
> Is heat trapped in the rack?
Probably.
> Would mounting servers sideways (vertically) allow heat to transfer out of the rack?
How could we find studies that have already tested this hypothesis?
What does the 'rc' in `.bashrc`, etc. mean?
For me, the hard part is remembering if .bashrc is supposed to source .bash_profile or vice versa.
info bash -n "Bash Startup Files"
Google ditched tipping feature for donating money to sites
> When asked, Google confirmed that the designs were an internal idea it explored last year but decided not to pursue as part of [Google Contributor] and Google Funding Choices, which lets sites ask visitors to disable ad blockers, or instead buy a subscription or pay a per page fee to remove ads.
Could this be built on Web Monetization API (ILP (Interledger Protocol)) and e.g. Google Pay as one of many possible payment/card/cryptocurrency processing backends; just like Coil is built on Web Monetization API?
Innovating on Web Monetization: Coil and Firefox Reality
Coil: $5/mo, Content creators get a proportional cut of that amount according to what is browsed with the browser extension enabled or the Puma browser, and Private: No Tracking
> Coil sends payments via the Interledger Protocol, which allows any currency to be used for sending and receiving.
It looks like the Web Monetization API is not yet listed on the Website Monetization Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization
Quoting from earlier this week:
> Web Monetization API (ILP: Interledger Protocol)
>> A JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website.
>> Web Monetization is being proposed as a #W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.
> https://webmonetization.org/
> Interledger: Web Monetization API https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-monetization/
Ask HN: Recommendations for online essay grading systems?
Which automated essay grading systems would you recommend? Are they open source?
How can we identify biases in these objective systems?
What are your experiences with these systems as authors and graders?
Who else remembers using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level metric in Word to evaluate school essays? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
Imagine my surprise when I learned that this metric is not one that was created for authors to maximize: reading ease for the widest audience is not an objective in some deparments, but a requirement.
What metrics do and should online essay grading systems present? As continuous feedback to authors, or as final judgement?
I'm reminded of a time in highschool when an essay that I wrote was flagged by an automated essay verification engine as plagiarism. I certainly hadn't plagiarized, and it was up to me to refute that each identified keyword-similar internet resource on the internet was not an uncited source of my paper. I disengaged. I later wrote an essay about how keyword search tools could be helpful to students doing original research. True story.
Decades later, I would guess that human review is still advisable.
This need of mine to have others validate my unpaid work has nothing to do with that traumatic experience.
I still harbor this belief in myself: that what I have to say is worth money to others, and that - someday - I'll pay a journal to consider my ScholarlyArticle for publishing in their prestigious publication with maybe even threaded peer review (and #StructuredPremises linking to Datasets and CreativeWorks that my #LinkedMetaAnalyses are predicated upon). Someday, I'll develop an online persona as a scholar, as a teacher, maybe someday as a TA or an associate professor and connect my CV to any or all of the social networks for academics. I'll work to minimize the costs of interviewing and searching public records. My research will be valued and funded.
Or maybe, like 20% time, I'll find time and money on the side for such worthwhile investigations; and what I produce will be of value to others: more than just an exercise in hearing myself speak.
In my years of internet communications, I've encountered quite a few patrons; lurkers; participants; and ne'er-do-wells who'll order 5 free waters, plaster their posters to the walls, harass paying customers, and just walk out like nothing's going to happen. Moderation costs time and money; and it's a dirty job that sometimes pays okay. There are various systems for grading these comments, these essays, these NewsArticles, these ScholarlyArticles. Human review is still advisable.
> How can we identify biases in these objective systems?
Modern "journalism" recognizes that it's not a one-way monologue but a dialogue: people want to comment. Ignorantly, helpfully, relevantly, insightfully, experiencedly. What separates the "article part" from the "comments part" of the dialogue? Typesetting, CSS, citations, quality of argumentation?
Ask HN: Systems for supporting Evidence-Based Policy?
What tools and services would you recommend for evidence-based policy tasks like meta-analysis, solution criteria development, and planned evaluations according to the given criteria?
Are they open source? Do they work with linked open data?
> Ask HN: Systems for supporting Evidence-Based Policy?
> What tools and services would you recommend for evidence-based policy tasks like meta-analysis, solution criteria development, and planned evaluations according to the given criteria?
> Are they open source? Do they work with linked open data?
I suppose I should clarify that citizens, consumers, voters, and journalists are not acceptable answers
Facebook, Google to be forced to share ad revenue with Australian media
What if Google and Facebook just said “No, thank you.”? I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship, which might say something about the tech giants. The only possible thing the Aussies could do is block the websites, and that sounds like political suicide to me. I’m guessing the companies will decide to play ball, but if other countries start to follow suit, it might be interesting to see what happens if they start pushing back.
There would be no political suicide there. It's so easy to make Google/Facebook look evil in this case if they don't comply. Just say they are not paying taxes and getting our money abroad etc.
But there is 0% chance of Google/Facebook not complying.
> I think Google and Facebook have more power in this relationship
Not even close.
Don't the French and Spanish examples indicate otherwise? Spain's link tax in 2014 led to the shutting-down of Google News Spain, and France's attempt to charge for Google News snippets led to the removal of those snippets for French sites (followed by a dip in traffic for pubs that hurt them far more than it hurt Google). What makes you think that FB/G don't have the power here?
If you don't want them to index your content and send you free traffic, you can already specify that in your robots.txt; for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
There are no ads on Google News.
There is an apparent glut of online news: supply exceeds demand and so the price has fallen.
> There are no ads on Google News.
This is the ironic part of the policy. You're right about the glut, and there was a glut in print 20 years ago, too. Google's definitely hurt businesses, but it's usually though disintermediating them (think Yelp). Google News and search don't really do that for news--snippets and headlines aren't the same as an article. I find it hard to believe that ABC's brand isn't strong enough for them to pull their content from Google and expect people to go to abc.net.au; I just don't think than can sell enough ads to give the content away.
By hurt, do you mean competed with by effectively utilizing technology to help people find information about the world from multiple sources.
There are very many news aggregators and most do serve ads next to the headlines they index. I assume that people typically link out from news aggregation sites more than into vertically-integrated services.
Perhaps the content producers / information service providers could develop additional revenue streams in order to subsidize a news aggregation public service. Micropayments (BAT, Web Monetization (ILP)), ads, paywalls, and public and private grants are sources of revenue for content producers.
I think it's disingenuous to blame news aggregation sites for the unprofitability of extremely redundant journalism. What happened to journalism? Internet. Excessive ads. Aren't we all writers these days.
Unfortunately they killed the "most cited" and was it "most in-depth" source analysis functions of Google News; and now we're stuck with regurgitated news wires and press releases and all of these eyewitness mobile phone videos with two-bit banal commentary and also punditry. How the world has changed.
So, as far as scientific experiments are concerned, it might be interesting to see what the impact of de-listing from free time sites X, Y, and Z is.
Do the papers in Australia and France now intend to compensate journal ScholarlyArticle authors whose work they summarize and hopefully at least cite the titles and URLs of, or the journals themselves?
France rules Google must pay news firms for content
Website monetization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monetization
Web Monetization API (ILP: Interledger Protocol)
> A JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website.
> Web Monetization is being proposed as a #W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.
Interledger: Web Monetization API https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-monetization/
Khan Academy, for example, accepts BAT (Basic Attention Token) micropayments/microdonations that e.g. Brave browser users can opt to share with the content producers and indexers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Basic_Atte...
Web Monetization w/ Interledger should enable any payments system with low enough transaction costs ("ledger-agnostic, currency agnostic") to be used to pay/tip/donate to content producers who are producing unsensational, unbiased content that people want to pay for.
Paywalls/subscriptions and ads are two other approaches to funding quality journalism.
Should journalists pay ScholarlyArticle authors whose studies they publish summaries of without even citing the DOI/URL and Title; or the journals said ScholarlyArticles are published in? https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle
Adafruit Thermal Camera Imager for Fever Screening
> Thermal Camera Imager for Fever Screening with USB Video Output - UTi165K. PRODUCT ID: 4579 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4579
> This video camera takes photos of temperatures! This camera is specifically tuned to work in the 30˚C~45˚C / 86˚F~113˚ F range with 0.5˚C / 1˚ F accuracy, so it's excellent for human temperature & fever detection. In fact, this thermal camera is often used by companies/airports/hotels/malls to do a first-pass fever check: If any person has a temperature of over 99˚F an alarm goes off so you can do a secondary check with an accurate handheld temperature meter.
> You may have seen thermal 'FLIR' cameras used to find air leaks in homes, but those cameras have a very wide temperature range, so they're not as accurate in the narrow range used for fever-scanning. This camera is designed specifically for that purpose!
... USB Type-C, SD Card; no price listed yet?
The end of an Era – changing every single instance of a 32-bit time_t in Linux
Thanks!
Year 2038 Problem > Solutions is already updated re: 5.6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Ask HN: What's the ROI of Y Combinator investments?
To calculate the ROI of YC investments, we could find the terms of the YC investments (x for y%, preference) and find the exit rate (what % of companies exit).
We could search for 'ROI of ycombinator investments' and find valuation numbers from a number of years ago.
From the first page of search results, we'd then learn about "return on capital" and how the standard YC seed terms have changed over the years.
Return on capital: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_capital
From the See also section of this Wikipedia page, we might discover "Cash flow return on investment" and "Rate of return on a portfolio"
From the "rate of return" Wikipedia page, we might learn that "The return on investment (ROI) is return per dollar invested. It is a measure of investment performance, as opposed to size (c.f. return on equity, return on assets, return on capital employed)." and that "The annualized return of an investment depends on whether or not the return, including interest and dividends, from one period is reinvested in the next period. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return
From the YCombinator Wikipedia page, we might read that "The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019. [4]" and that "As of late 2019, Y Combinator had invested in >2,000 companies [37], most of which are for-profit. Non-profit organizations can also participate in the main YC program. [38]" and then read about "seed accelerators" and then "business incubators" in search of appropriate metrics for comparing VC performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator
ROI is such a frou frou statistic anyway. What does that even mean, ROI? In any case, YC itself is not a public company, per se, AFAICT, so, it's not so easy as going to https://YCharts.com, entering the equity symbol, clicking on "Key Stats", and scrolling down to "Profitability" to review [Gross | EBITDA | Operating] [Profit] Margin.
The LTSE (Long-Term Stock Exchange) is where people who are in this for real are really doing it now.
Microsoft announces Money in Excel powered by Plaid
This looks really useful.
At first glance, I found a number of ways to push transaction data into Google Sheets from the Plaid API:
build-your-own-mint (NodeJS, CircleCI) https://github.com/yyx990803/build-your-own-mint
go-plaid: https://github.com/ebcrowder/go-plaid
Presumably, like the GOOGLEFINANCE function, there's some way to pull data from an API with just Apps Script (~JS) without an auxiliary serverless function to get the txs from Plaid and post to the gsheets API?
Lora-based device-to-device smartphone communication for crisis scenarios [pdf]
Sudomesh has been working on one of these devices, disaster radio: https://disaster.radio
I like the solar integration. My ideal product would be a programmable LoRa transceiver integrates into a waterproof battery bank with solar, gps and a small touch screen. Should be about the size of a large handheld which could mounted on a house, tree, mast or carry it in a pocket/bag. Apps could be, SOS messages, chat and weather information. If it’s extensible (e.g. something like an app store or package manager), I’m sure folks will dream up additional uses.
Sort of like a more hackable/accessible phone and long range radio.
Unfortunately, the Earl tablet never made it to market: https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2015/01/26/video-update-ab...
Earl specs: Waterproof; Solar charging; eInk; ANT+; NFC; VHF/UHF transceiver (GMRS, PMR446, UHFCB); GPS; Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Magnetometer, Temperature, Barometer, Humidity; AM/FM/SW/LW/WB
LTE, LoRa, 5G, and Hostapd would be great
Being able to plug it into a powerbank and antennas for use as a fixed or portable e.g. BATMAN mesh relay would be great
"LoRa+WiFi ClusterDuck Protocol by Project OWL for Disaster Relief" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707267
> An opkg (for e.g. OpenWRT) with this mesh software would make it possible to use WiFi/LTE routers with a LoRa transmitter/receiver connected over e.g. USB or Mini-PCIe.
LoRa+WiFi ClusterDuck Protocol by Project OWL for Disaster Relief
> Project OWL (Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics) creates a mesh network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices called DuckLinks. These Wi-Fi-enabled devices can be deployed or activated in disaster areas to quickly re-establish connectivity and improve communication between first responders and civilians in need.
> In OWL, a central portal connects to solar- and battery-powered, water-resistant DuckLinks. These create a Local Area Network (LAN). In turn, these power up a Wi-Fi captive portal using low-frequency Long-range Radio (LoRa) for Internet connectivity. LoRA has a greater range, about 10km, than cellular networks.
...
> You don't actually need a DuckLink device. The open-source OWL firmware can quickly turn a cheap wireless device into a DuckLink using the -- I swear I'm not making this up -- ClusterDuck Protocol. This is a mesh network node, which can hook up to any other near-by Ducks.
> OWL is more than just hardware and firmware. It's also a cloud-based analytic program. The OWL Data Management Software can be used to facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response.
Homepage: http://clusterduckprotocol.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/Code-and-Response/ClusterDuck-Protocol
The Linux Foundation > Code and Response https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/code-and-response/
An opkg (for e.g. OpenWRT) with this mesh software would make it possible to use WiFi/LTE routers with a LoRa transmitter/receiver connected over e.g. USB or Mini-PCIe.
... cc'ing from https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1238859774567026688 :
OpenWRT is a Make-based embedded Linux distro w/ LuCI (Lua + JSON + UCI) web interface).
#OpenWRT runs on RaspberryPis, ARM, x86, ARM, MIPS; there's a Docker image. OpenWRT Supported Devices: https://openwrt.org/supported_devices
OpenWRT uses opkg packages: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/additional-software/opkg
I searched for "Lora" in OpenWRT/packages: lora-gateway-hal opkg package: https://github.com/openwrt/packages/blob/master/net/lora-gat...
lora-packet-forwarder opkg package (w/ UCI integration): https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/8320
https://github.com/xueliu/lora-feed :
> Semtech packages and ChirpStack [(LoRaserver)] Network Server stack for OpenWRT
> > [In addition to providing node2node/2net connectivity, #batman-adv can bridge VLANs over a mesh (or link), such as for “trusted” client, guest, IoT, and mgmt networks. It provides an easy-to-configure alternative to other approaches to “backhaul”, […]] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/batman
> I have a few different [quad-core, MIMO] ARM devices without 4G. TIL that the @GLiNetWifi devices ship with OpenWRT firmware (and a mobile config app) and some have 1-2 (Mini-PCIe) 4G w/ SIM slots. Also, @turris_cz has OpenWRT w/ LXC in the kernel build. https://t.co/Rz0Uu5uHJQ
A Visual Debugger for Jupyter
Source: jupyterlab/debugger https://github.com/jupyterlab/debugger
When will jupyter have "highlight and execute" functionality? The cell concept is fine, but I'm constantly copy pasting snippets of code into new cells to get that "incremental" coding approach...
So, I went looking for the answer to this because in the past I've installed the scratchpad extension by installing jupyter_contrib_nbextensions, but those don't work with JupyterLab because there's a new extension model for JupyterLab that requires node and npm.
Turns out that with JupyterLab, all you have to to is right-click and select "New Console for Notebook" and it opens a console pane below the notebook already attached to the notebook kernel. You can also instead do File > New > Console and select a kernel listed under "Use Kernel From Other Session".
The "New action runInConsole to allow line by line execution of cell content" "PR adds a notebook command `notebook:run-in-console`" but you have to add the associated keyboard shortcut to your config yourself; e.g. `Ctrl Shift Enter` or `Ctrl-G` that calls `notebook:run-in-console`. https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/pull/4330
"In Jupyter Lab, execute editor code in Python console" describes how to add the associated keyboard shortcut to your config: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38648286/in-jupyter-lab-...
Ask HN: What's the Equivalent of 'Hello, World' for a Quantum Computer?
The 'Hello,World' program is one of the simplest programs to demonstrate how to go about writing a program in a new programming language.
What is an equivalent simple program which demonstrates how to write a very simple program for a quantum computer?
I have tried (and failed) to imagine such a program. Can somebody who has actually used a quantum computer show us an actual quantum computer program?
"Getting Started with Qiskit" https://qiskit.org/documentation/getting_started.html
Qiskit / qiskit-community-tutorials > "1 Hello, Quantum World with Qiskit" https://github.com/Qiskit/qiskit-community-tutorials#1-hello...
"Quantum basics with Q#" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quickstart?tabs=tab...
Qutip notebooks: https://github.com/qutip/qutip#run-notebooks-online
Jupyter Notebooks labeled quantum-computing: https://github.com/topics/quantum-computing?l=jupyter+notebo...
Ask HN: Communication platforms for intermittent disaster relief?
Are there good platforms for disaster relief that work well with intermittent connectivity (i.e. spotty 3G/4G/WiFi/LoRa)?
How can major networks improve in terms of e.g. indicating message delivery status, most recent sync time, sync throttling status due to load, optionally downloading images/audio/video, referring people to local places and/or forms for help with basic needs, etc?
What are some tools that app developers can use to simulate intermittent connectivity when running tests?
DroneAid: A Symbol Language and ML model for indicating needs to drones, planes
From the README https://github.com/Code-and-Response/DroneAid :
> The DroneAid Symbol Language provides a way for those affected by natural disasters to express their needs and make them visible to drones, planes, and satellites when traditional communications are not available.
> Victims can use a pre-packaged symbol kit that has been manufactured and distributed to them, or recreate the symbols manually with whatever materials they have available.
> These symbols include those below, which represent a subset of the icons provided by The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). These can be complemented with numbers to quantify need, such as the number or people who need water.
Each of the symbols are drawn within a triangle pointing up:
- Immediate Help Needed (orange; downward triangle \n SOS),
- Shelter Needed (cyan; like a guy standing in a tall pentagon without a floor),
- OK: No Help Needed (green; upward triangle \n OK),
- First Aid Kit Needed (yellow; briefcase with a first aid cross),
- Water Needed (blue; rain droplet), Area with Children in Need (lilac; baby looking thing with a diaper on),
- Food Needed (red; pan with wheat drawn above it),
- Area with Elderly in Need (purple; person with a cane)
So, we're going to need some artists; something to write large things with; some orange, cyan, green, yellow, blue, lilac, red, and purple things; some people who can tell me the difference between lilac (light purple: babies) and purple (darker purple: old people); and some drones that can capture location and imagery.
Note that DroneAid is also a project of The Linux Foundation Code and Response organization.
Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
Hi guys, can you recommend interesting books on Computer Science or computer history (similar to Dealers of Lightning) to read on this quarantine times? I really like that subject and am looking for something to keep myself away from TV at night.
Thank you.
The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick is great. Starts with Ada Lovelace/Charles Babbage and goes on from there, I found it fascinating.
"The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" starts with "1 | Drums That Talk" re: African drum messaging; a complex coding scheme:
> Here was a messaging system that outpaced the best couriers, the fastest horses on good roads with way stations and relays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8701960-the-information
From "Polynesian People Used Binary Numbers 600 Years Ago" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/polynesian-people... :
> Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a study now shows that a kind of binary system was already in use 300 years earlier among the people of the tiny Pacific island of Mangareva in French Polynesia.
Open-source security tools for cloud and container applications
It's odd they don't list OPA Gatekeeper, which is probably the best tool for enforcing security and other best practices in Kubernetes clusters.
List of CNCF open source security projects without the blog post: https://landscape.cncf.io/category=security-compliance&forma...
> List of CNCF open source security projects without the blog post: https://landscape.cncf.io/category=security-compliance&forma...
Thanks for this.
YC Companies Responding to Covid-19
Are life sciences and healthcare familiar verticals for YC?
Good to see money and talent going to such good use.
(Edit) Here's the YC Companies list; which doesn't yet list these new investments:
Biomedical vertical: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?vertical=Biomedical
Healthcare vertical: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?vertical=Healthcare
"The Y Combinator Database" https://www.ycdb.co/
Show HN: Neh – Execute any script or program from Nginx location directives
And we've come back round full circle from CGI scripts, although separating out headers and body on different fds sounds neat
Many things we’ve dispensed with long ago seem to be forgotten and the younger coders are learning for themselves the hard way. Aka the same way we did.
One of the things I'm wondering however: How popular is CGI if I don't find it with the query "run script on nginx location directive".
Nginx probably somewhat-deliberately has FastCGI but not regular CGI for a number of reasons.
CGI has process-per-request overhead.
CGI typically runs processes as the user the webserver is running as; said processes can generally read and write to the unsandboxed address space of the calling process (such as x.509 private certs).
Just about any app can be (D)DOS'd. That requires less resources with the process-per-request overhead of CGI.
In order to prevent resource exhaustion due to e.g someone benignly hitting reload a bunch of times and thus creating multiple GET requests, applications should enqueue task messages which a limited number of workers retrieve from a (durable) FIFO or priority queue and update the status of.
Websockets may or may not scale better than long-polling for streaming stdout to a client.
Interesting and really informative! Thanks for sharing!
Ask HN: How can a intermediate-beginner learn Unix/Linux and programming?
For a long time, I’ve been in an awkward position with my knowledge of computers. I know basic JavaScript (syntax and booleans and nothing more). I’ve learned the bare basics of Linux from setting up a Pi-hole. I understand the concept of secure hashes. I even know some regex.
The problem is, I know so little that I can’t actually do anything with this knowledge. I suppose I’m looking for a tutorial that will teach me to be comfortable with the command line and a Unix environment, while also teaching me to code a language. Where should I start?
a really good book is Richard Stevens Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment[1]. (sounds daunting but it's not too bad when you combine it with another introductory text on C). If you stick with C you'll eventually know UNIX/Linux a lot deeper than anyone. It takes time though so go easy on yourself.
Also check github for a bunch of repos that contain biolerplate code that is used in most deamons illustrating signal handling, forking, etc.[2]
Also I suggest taking some open source projects from Daniel Bernstein (DJB) as examples on how to write secure code. qmail, djbdns, daemontools ... there are lots of great ideas there[3]
Write a couple of simple programs that utilize your code and expand from there, learn the plumbing, e.g. write a Makefile, learn autotools/autoconf, how to write tests, how to use gdb, how to create shared libs and link a program LD_LIBRARY_PATH/ldconfig, etc ...
Most important think about something that you like to write and go from there. Back in the late 90ies I studied RFC's (MIME, SMTP, etc) and then implemented things that I could actually use myself. Here is a recent project I did some weeks ago (an extreme edge-case for security maximalists which will never be used by anyone other then myself, ... but I really enjoyed writing this and learned a bunch of new stuff while doing so)[4]
if you need ideas or help with looking at your code, don't hesitate and send me a mail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Programming_in_the_Un...
> Also check github for a bunch of repos that contain biolerplate code that is used in most deamons illustrating signal handling, forking, etc.[2]
docker-systemctl-replacement is a (partial) reimplementation of systemd as one python script that can be run as the init process of a container that's helpful for understanding how systemd handles processes: https://github.com/gdraheim/docker-systemctl-replacement/blo...
systemd is written in C: https://github.com/systemd/systemd
> examples of how to write secure code
awesome-safety-critical > Coding Guidelines https://github.com/stanislaw/awesome-safety-critical/blob/ma...
Math Symbols Explained with Python
Average of a finite series: There's a statistics module in Python 3.4+:
X = [1, 2, 3]
from statistics import mean, fmean
mean(X)
# may or may not be preferable to
sum(X) / len(X)
Product of a terminating iterable:
import operator
from functools import reduce
# from itertools import accumulate
reduce(operator.mul, X)
from numpy import linalg as LA
LA.norm(X)
Function domains and ranges can be specified and checked at compile-time with type annotations or at runtime with type()/isinstance() or with something like pycontracts or icontracts for checking preconditions and postconditions.
Dot product:
Y = [4, 5, 6]
np.dot(X, Y)
Unit vector:
X / np.linalg.norm(X)Ask HN: Is there way you can covert smartphone to a no contact thermometer?
Wondering is there an infrared dongle that can convert your phone to a no contact thermometer to read body temperature?
Infrared thermometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_thermometer
Thermography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermography
IDK what the standard error is for medical temperature estimation with an e.g. FLIR ONE thermal imaging camera for an Android/iOS device. https://www.flir.com/applications/home-outdoor/
I'd imagine that sanitization would be crucial for any clinical setting.
(Edit) "Prediction of brain tissue temperature using near-infrared spectroscopy" (2017) Neurophotonics https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5469395/
"Nirs body temperature" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=nir...
"Infrared body temperature" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=inf...
"Infrared thermometer iOS" https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=infrared%20the...
"Infrared thermometer Android" https://alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=infrared%20therm...
Employee Scheduling
From "Ask HN: What algorithms should I research to code a conference scheduling app" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15267804 :
> Resource scheduling, CSP (Constraint Satisfaction programming)
CSP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_satisfaction_proble...
Scheduling (production processes):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(production_process...
Scheduling (computing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)
... To an OS, a process thread has a priority and sometimes a CPU affinity.
From http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.python.omaha+pysche... :
Pyschedule:
- Src: https://github.com/timnon/pyschedule
From https://github.com/timnon/pyschedule :
> pyschedule is python package to compute resource-constrained task schedules. Some features are:
- precedence relations: e.g. task A should be done before task B
- resource requirements: e.g. task A can be done by resource X or Y
- resource capacities: e.g. resource X can only process a few tasks
Previous use-cases include:
- school timetables: assign teachers to classes
- beer brewing: assign equipment to brewing stages
- sport schedules: assign stadiums to games
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slurm_Workload_Manager :
> Slurm is the workload manager on about 60% of the TOP500 supercomputers.[1]
Slurm uses a best fit algorithm based on Hilbert curve scheduling or fat tree network topology in order to optimize locality of task assignments on parallel computers.[2]
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve_scheduling :
> [...] the Hilbert curve scheduling method turns a multidimensional task allocation problem into a one-dimensional space filling problem using Hilbert curves, assigning related tasks to locations with higher levels of proximity.[1] Other space filling curves may also be used in various computing applications for similar purposes.[2]
Show HN: Simulation-based high school physics course notes
I love the train demo for general & special relativity, they intuitively explain the theories from frames of reference (ground/train).
This helped me instantly understand the 2 theories, great work!
WebAssembly brings extensibility to network proxies
FWIW, Ethereum WASM (ewasm) has a cost (in "particles" ("gas")) for each WebAssembly opcode. [1]
Opcode costs help to incentivize efficient code.
ewasm/design /README.md [2] links to the complete WebAssembly instruction set. [3]
[1] https://ewasm.readthedocs.io/en/mkdocs/determining_wasm_gas_...
[2] https://github.com/ewasm/design/blob/master/README.md
[3] https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/appendix/index-instr...
Pandemic Ventilator Project
> https://www.projectopenair.org/
From https://app.jogl.io/project/121#about
>> Current Status of the project
>> The main bottleneck currently (2020-03-13) is organization / management.
>> […] This is an organization of experts and hobbyists from around the globe.
The link https://app.jogl.io/project/121#about doesn't go anywhere anymore. And there are no results for "ventilator" in the app.jogl.io search.
I see a "Ventilator Project" heading?
(edit) here's the link to their 'Ventilator' document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RDihfZIOEYs60kPEIVDe7gms...
Low-cost ventilator wins Sloan health care prize (2019)
Relating to coronavirus (COVID-19), if you require a ventilator, your survival chances are already slim.
> The median time from illness onset (ie, before admission) to discharge was 22·0 days (IQR 18·0–25·0), whereas the median time to death was 18·5 days (15·0–22·0; table 2). 32 patients required invasive mechanical ventilation, of whom 31 (97%) died. The median time from illness onset to invasive mechanical ventilation was 14·5 days (12·0–19·0). Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation was used in three patients, none of whom survived. Sepsis was the most frequently observed complication, followed by respiratory failure, ARDS, heart failure, and septic shock (table 2). Half of non-survivors experienced a secondary infection, and ventilator-associated pneumonia occurred in ten (31%) of 32 patients requiring invasive mechanical ventilation. The frequency of complications were higher in non-survivors than survivors (table 2)
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820...
Ventilator availability is limiting our ability to get care to the most people we can.
True, but at least Italy claims that the main bottleneck in ventilator availability isn't in the machines themselves but in trained doctors and nurses to support patients on ventilators.
AI can detect coronavirus from CT scans in twenty seconds
Is it possible to detect coronavirus with NIRS (Near-Infrared Spectroscopy)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy
FWIU, the equipment costs and scan times are lower with NIRS than with CT or MRI? And infrared is zero rads?
(Edit) I think it was this or the TED video that had the sweet demo: "The Science of Visible Thought & Our Translucent Selves | Mary Lou Jepsen | SU Global Summit" https://youtu.be/IRCXNBzfeC4
Are these devices in production?
AutoML-Zero: Evolving machine learning algorithms from scratch
Next:
- Autosuggest database tables to use
- Automatically reserve parallel computing resources
- Autodetect data health issues and auto fix them
- Autodetect concept drift and auto fix it
- Auto engineer features and interactions
- Autodetect leakage and fix it
- Autodetect unfairness and auto fix it
- Autocreate more weakly-labelled training data
- Autocreate descriptive statistics and model eval stats
- Autocreate monitoring
- Autocreate regulations reports
- Autocreate a data infra pipeline
- Autocreate a prediction serving endpoint
- Auto setup a meeting with relevant stakeholders on Google Calendar
- Auto deploy on Google Cloud
- Automatically buy carbon offset
- Auto fire your in-house data scientists
Would be funny but most of those things are already on AutoML Tables, including the carbon offset
> Would be funny but most of those things are already on AutoML Tables, including the carbon offset
GCP datacenters are 100% offset with PPAs. Are you referring to different functionality for costing AutoML instructions in terms of carbon?
...
I'd add:
- Setup a Jupyter Notebook environment
> Jupyter Notebooks are one of the most popular development tools for data scientists. They enable you to create interactive, shareable notebooks with code snippets and markdown for explanations. Without leaving Google Cloud's hosted notebook environment, AI Platform Notebooks, you can leverage the power of AutoML technology.
> There are several benefits of using AutoML technology from a notebook. Each step and setting can be codified so that it runs the same every time by everyone. Also, it's common, even with AutoML, to need to manipulate the source data before training the model with it. By using a notebook, you can use common tools like pandas and numpy to preprocess the data in the same workflow. Finally, you have the option of creating a model with another framework, and ensemble that together with the AutoML model, for potentially better results.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/u...
This sounds like the sort of thing that would be useful outside of data science. Which leads to the question of whether it needs to be generalized, or redone differently for different specializations. Which in turn seems like the sort of question that it's tricky to answer with AI.
> This sounds like the sort of thing that would be useful outside of data science.
The instruction/operation costing or the computational essay/notebook environment setup?
Ethereum ("gas") and EOS have per-instruction costing. SingularityNET is a marketplace for AI solutions hosted on a blockchain, where you pay for AI/ML services with the SingularityNET AGI token. E.g. GridCoin and CureCoin compensate compute resource donations with their own tokens; which also have a floating exchange rate.
TLJH: "The Littlest JupyterHub" describes how to setup multi-user JupyterHub with e.g. Docker spawners that isolate workloads running with shared resources like GPUs and TPUs: http://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/
"Zero to BinderHub" describes how to setup BinderHub on a k8s cluster: https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zero-to-binderhub...
The notebook/procedure thing. Like, doesn't everybody everywhere operate on a basis of mixed manual/automated procedures, where it needs to fluidly transition from one to another, yet be controlled and recorded and verified and structured?
REES is one solution to reproducibility of the computational environment.
> BinderHub ( https://mybinder.org/ ) creates docker containers from {git repos, Zenodo, FigShare,} and launches them in free cloud instances also running JupyterLab by building containers with repo2docker (with REES (Reproducible Execution Environment Specification)). This means that all I have to do is add an environment.yml to my git repo in order to get Binder support so that people can just click on the badge in the README to launch JupyterLab with all of the dependencies installed.
> REES supports a number of dependency specifications: requirements.txt, Pipfile.lock, environment.yml, aptSources, postBuild. With an environment.yml, I can install the necessary CPython/PyPy version and everything else.
REES: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specification.h...
REES configuration files: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...
Storing a container built with repo2docker in a container registry is one way to increase the likelihood that it'll be possible to run the same analysis pipeline with the same data and get the same results years later.
...
Pachyderm ( https://pachyderm.io/platform/ ) does Data Versioning, Data Pipelines (with commands that each run in a container), and Data Lineage (~ "data provenance"). What other platforms are there for versioning data and recording data provenance?
...
Recording manual procedures is an area where we've somewhat departed from the "write in a lab notebook with a pen" practice. CoCalc records all (collaborative) inputs to the notebook with a timeslider for review.
In practice, people use notebooks for displaying generated charts, manual exploratory analyses (which does introduce bias), for demonstrating APIs, and for teaching.
Is JupyterLab an ideal IDE? Nope, not by a longshot. nbdev makes it easier to write a function in a notebook, sync it to a module, edit it with a more complete data-science IDE (like RStudio, VSCode, Spyder, etc), and then copy it back into the notebook. https://github.com/fastai/nbdev
> What other platforms are there for versioning data and recording data provenance?
Quilt also versions data and data pipelines: https://medium.com/pytorch/how-to-iterate-faster-in-machine-...
https://github.com/quiltdata/quilt (Python)
Poor data scientists, now whose heads get cut when things go wrong and companies lose billions?
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Is this an argument in favor of unjustified magic constant arbitrary priors?
A sufficiently large amount of random data contains all the magic constants you could want.
AutoML-Zero aims to automatically discover computer programs that can solve machine learning tasks, starting from empty or random programs and using only basic math operations.
If this system is not using human bias, who is it choosing what good program is? Surely, human labeling data involves humans adding their bias to the data?
It seems like AlphaGoZero was able to do just end-to-end ML because it was able to use a very clear and "objective" standard, whether a program wins or loses at the game of Go.
Would this approach only deal with similarly unambiguous problems?
Edit: also, AlphaGoZero was one of the most ML ever created (at least at the time of its creation). How much computing resources would this require for more fully general learning? Will there be a limit to such an approach?
Options for giving math talks and lectures online
One option: screencast development of a Jupyter notebook.
Jupyter Notebook supports LaTeX (MathTeX) and inline charts. You can create graded notebooks with nbgrader and/or with CoCalc (which records all (optionally multi-user) input such that you can replay it with a time slider).
Jupyter notebooks can be saved to HTML slides with reveal.js, but if you want to execute code cells within a slide, you'll need to install RISE: https://rise.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Here are the docs for CoCalc Course Management; Handouts, Assignments, nbgrader: https://doc.cocalc.com/teaching-course-management.html
Here are the docs for nbgrader: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
You can also grade Jupyter notebooks in Open edX:
> Auto-grade a student assignment created as a Jupyter notebook, using the nbgrader Jupyter extension, and write the score in the Open edX gradebook
https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-grader-xblock
Or just show the Jupyter notebook within an edX course: https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-viewer-xblock
There are also ways to integrate Jupyter notebooks with various LMS / LRS systems (like Canvas, Blackboard, etc) "nbgrader and LMS / LRS; LTI, xAPI" on the "Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks" mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jupyter-education/_U...
"Teaching and Learning with Jupyter" ("An open book about Jupyter and its use in teaching and learning.") https://jupyter4edu.github.io/jupyter-edu-book/
> TLJH: "The Littlest JupyterHub" describes how to setup multi-user JupyterHub with e.g. Docker spawners that isolate workloads running with shared resources like GPUs and TPUs: http://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/
> "Zero to BinderHub" describes how to setup BinderHub on a k8s cluster: https://binderhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/zero-to-binderhub...
If you create a git repository with REES-compatible dependency specification file(s), students can generate a container with all of the same software at home with repo2docker or with BinderHub.
> REES is one solution to reproducibility of the computational environment.
>> BinderHub ( https://mybinder.org/ ) creates docker containers from {git repos, Zenodo, FigShare,} and launches them in free cloud instances also running JupyterLab by building containers with repo2docker (with REES (Reproducible Execution Environment Specification)). This means that all I have to do is add an environment.yml to my git repo in order to get Binder support so that people can just click on the badge in the README to launch JupyterLab with all of the dependencies installed.
>> REES supports a number of dependency specifications: requirements.txt, Pipfile.lock, environment.yml, aptSources, postBuild. With an environment.yml, I can install the necessary CPython/PyPy version and everything else.
> REES: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specification.h...
> REES configuration files: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...
> Storing a container built with repo2docker in a container registry is one way to increase the likelihood that it'll be possible to run the same analysis pipeline with the same data and get the same results years later.
Aerogel from fruit biowaste produces ultracapacitors
> "Aerogel from fruit biowaste produces ultracapacitors with high energy density and stability" (2020) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X1...
Years ago, I remember reading about supercapacitor electrodes made from what would be waste hemp bast fiber. They used graphene as a control. And IIRC, the natural branching structure in hemp (the strongest natural fiber) was considered ideal for an electrode.
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast" https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/hemp-carbon-ma...
How do the costs and performance compare? Graphene, hemp, durian, jackfruit
While graphene production costs have fallen due to lots of recent research, IIUC all graphene production is hazardous due to graphene's ability to cross the lungs and the blood-brain barrier?
All my life, I've heard people go on and on about the magical properties of hemp.
It's hilarious.
They have these material science level arguments about hemp, yet the same people would be hard pressed to find an alternative use for cotton aside from clothes, or wood pulp aside from ikea furniture.
It's a desert topping, it's a driveway sealant. And the government won't let us have it!
Hemp textiles are rough, but antimicrobial/antibacterial: hemp textiles resist growth of pneumonia and staph.
AFAIU, when they blend hemp with e.g. rayon it's good enough for underwear, sheets, scrubs.
The government is getting the heck out of the way of hemp, a great rotation crop that can be used for soul remediation.
damn if hemp doesn't make a come back.. from cbd to ultracaps..
Hopefully but it’s only been legal to grow hemp in the US since 2018. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/13/18139678/cbd-indust...
Technically, the 2013 farm bill (signed into law in 2014) authorized growing hemp for state-registered research purposes. https://www.votehemp.com/laws-and-legislation/federal-legisl...
Turns out UC Berkeley's got an approach for brewing cannabinoids (and I think terpenes) from yeast, and a company in Germany has a provisional patent application to brew cannabinoids from bacteria. We could be absorbing carbon ("sequestering" carbon) and coal ash acid rain with mostly fields of industrial hemp for which there are indeed thousands of uses.
Ask HN: How to Take Good Notes?
I want to improve my note-taking skill. I've started writing a text file with notes from class, however, I don't have a systematic way of writing. This means at this point I just wrote down, arbitrarily, things the professor said, things the professor wrote, how I understood the information, and everything else, mostly all over the place.
I'm wondering if anyone developed a system like this I could adapt to myself, and how did they do it.
I think you ought to consider whether you should take notes at all. Notetaking is great for remembering actions that you have comitted to doing, or if you need to spread information to people who didn't participate in a meeting. Managers need to do a lot of notetaking.
However, taking notes seriously hinder your ability to engage with the material and build true understanding as you are listening, which would have helped you remember the material right away. If you are in school or are an individual contributor in a company I think you ought to stop taking notes all together.
If you need notes for future practice I would advice you to write them after the meeting/lecture. Actively recalling things from memory is the best form practice.
> In 2009, psychologist Jackie Andrade asked 40 people to monitor a 2-½ minute dull and rambling voice mail message. Half of the group doodled while they did this (they shaded in a shape), and the other half did not. They were not aware that their memories would be tested after the call. Surprisingly, when both groups were asked to recall details from the call, those that doodled were better at paying attention to the message and recalling the details. They recalled 29% more information! https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-thinking-benefits-of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doodle#Effects_on_memory references the same study.
Related articles on GScholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:YVG_-PKhNH4J:sc...
> dull and rambling voice mail message
This is in no way a realistic study. A dull and rambling voice speaking about some random thing not related to you or your work will make people disengage. Doodling presumably keeps people from totally spacing out.
Many lectures and meetings may be experienced as similarly dross and irrelevant and a waste of time (though you can't expect people to just read the necessary information ahead of time, as flipped classrooms expect of committed learners).
What would be a better experimental design for measuring effect on memory retention of passively-absorbed lectures?
Ask HN: STEM toy for a 3 years old?
Hello! Can the HN community recommend me a STEM toy (or similar that would educate and entertain him) for my 3 yo boy? He's highly curious but I can't find many things to play with him :( The things that I like bore him and the things that he likes bore me (or are way too messy and dangerous to let him do them)...
"12 Awesome (& Educational) STEM Subscription Boxes for Kids" https://stemeducationguide.com/subscription-boxes-for-kids/
Tape measure with big numbers, ruler(s)
Measuring cup, water, ice.
"Melissa & Doug Sunny Patch Dilly Dally Tootle Turtle Target Game (Active Play & Outdoor, Two Color Self-Sticking Bean Bags, Great Gift for Girls and Boys - Best for 3, 4, 5, and 6 Year Olds)"
Set of wooden blocks in a wood box; such as "Melissa & Doug Standard Unit Blocks"
...
https://sugarlabs.org/ , GCompris mouse and keyboard games with a trackpad and a mouse, ABCMouse, Khan Academy Kids, Code.org, ScratchJr (5-7), K12 Computer Science Framework https://k12cs.org/
OpenAPI v3.1 and JSON Schema 2019-09
In all honesty, isn't json schema and open api more or less reinventing wsdl/soap/rpc? It feels like we've come full circle now and replaced <> with {} (and on the way lost a lot of mature xml tooling).
Defusedxml lists a number of XML "Attack vectors: billion laughs / exponential entity expansion, quadratic blowup entity expansion, external entity expansion (remote), external entity expansion (local file), DTD retrieval" https://pypi.org/project/defusedxml/
Are there similar vulnerabilities in JSON parsers (that would then also need to be monkeypatched)?
Sure, but the page itself says, that it's mostly based on some uncommon features. Since we are converging to the feature list of XML/WSDL with JSON, what makes you think that some JSON (i'm using JSON as placeholder for the next big thing in the JSON space) parsing libraries won't have bugs? Isn't that the danger of the added complexity?
So, most likely some of those uncommon features won't be added to JSON but why didn't "we" as a community then not "just" invent "XML light" or disable those dangerous but sometimes used features behind better defaults?
So, over the years all i've seen is some mumble jumble over how XML is too complicated and too noisy and big, atleast i used to say that, but what if that complexity came from decades of usage, from real requirements? Why wouldn't we arrive in the same situation 10 or 20 years from now? And if size matters so much, why do we ship megabytes of code for simple websites? And why didn't we choose protobuffers over JSON?
And what makes you think that the next generation won't think that JSON is too complicated (because naturally, complexity will increase with new requirements and features). So, i suppose we'll see a JSON replacement with different brackets ("TOML Schema"?) in the future. Or maybe it's time for a binary representation again, just to be replaced with the next "editor friendly and humanly readable" format.
It all feels like, we as an industry took a step backward for years (instead of improving the given tools and specs) just to head to the same level of complexity all the while throwing away lots and lots of mature tooling of XML processing.
P.S.: Same goes probably for ASN.1 vs. XML Schemas... So now we are in the 3rd generation of schema based data representation: ASN.1 -> XML -> JSON..
P.P.S.: I'm not arguing that we all should use XML now, i'm reflecting over the historical course and what might be ahead of us. Clearly, XML is declining steadily and has "lost".
Yeah, expressing complex types with only primitives in a portable way is still unfortunately a challenge. For example, how do we encode a datetime without ISO8601 and a schema definition; or, how do we encode complex numbers with units like "1j+1"; or "1.01 USD/meter"?
Fortunately, we can use XSD with RDFS and RDFS with JSON-LD.
LDP: Linked Data Platform and Solid: social linked data (and JSON-LD) are the newer W3C specs for HTTP APIs.
For one, pagination is a native feature of LDP.
JSON-LD is just the same old RDF data model that the W3C promotes unsuccessfully for that last 2 decades, repackaged with trendy JSON syntax. It's almost as unreadable as the XML serialization and still put very little value on the table. It shines however with people who like to do over-engineering instead of delivering a product.
It's astounding how often people make claims like this.
There is a whole lot of RDF Linked Data; and it links together without needing ad-hoc implementations of schema-specific relations.
I'll just link to the Linked Open Data Cloud again, for yet another hater that's probably never done anything for data interoperability: https://lod-cloud.net/
That's a success.
the only thing I miss are the comments
JSON5 supports comments: https://json5.org/
But who supports json5?
You can use json5 for comments and compile it to json.
You can use (yaml, hjson, jsonnet) for the same purpose. What sets json 5 apart?
YAML, hjson and jsonnet do not validate existing json blobs. You can "use" ROT13 for the same purpose, but it's incidental in what you are trying to do.
I would plead that everyone stop using YAML. It's terrible at everything.
jsonnet is a template language for a serialization format. Who would choose that nightmare?
Ecmascript isn't big on extending the language orthogonally, so hjson is eventually going to be superceded by a ES*.
This is a niche concern that has an optimal path. Go with a validation schema designed for applying to a serialization format, which has widespread library support.
>YAML ... do not validate existing json blobs
YAML 1.2 is a strict superset of JSON. What do you mean by "validate" here?
>I would plead that everyone stop using YAML. It's terrible at everything.
Fair enough.
>jsonnet is a template language for a serialization format. Who would choose that nightmare?
People who are tired of Jinja2 and YAML but don't want to jump to a general purpose programming language?
>widespread library support
JSON5 is implemented in Javascript, Go, and C#. Not sure how "widespread" that is. Rust, C, Python, Lua, Java, and Haskell are missing out on the fun.
Git for Node.js and the browser using libgit2 compiled to WebAssembly
This looks useful. Are there pending standards for other browser storage mechanisms than an in-memory FS?
Would it be a security risk to grant limited local filesystem access by domain; with a storage quota?
... To answer my own question, it looks like the FileSystem API is still experimental and only browser extensions can request access to the actual filesystem: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem
Actually, looks like emscripten has support for a few different options, including IndexedDB[1]. I have a use case where we'd like to both use the local filesystem via Node APIs as well as in-memory in the browser. I asked the author of wasm-git and it looks like this is possible with a custom build[2].
[1]: https://emscripten.org/docs/api_reference/Filesystem-API.htm...
Scientists use ML to find an antibiotic able to kill superbugs in mice
> That is an especially pressing challenge in the development of new antibiotics, because a lack of economic incentives has caused pharmaceutical companies to pull back from the search for badly needed treatments. Each year in the U.S., drug-resistant bacteria and fungi cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths, with more than a third of fatalities attributable to C. diff, according to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How big does the market have to be to commercially viable for research and development? Nearly 3M potential patients at a couple hundred dollars per course is nearing a $1B/year.
The second-order costs avoided by treatments developed so innovatingly could be included in a "value to society" estimation.
"Acknowledgements" lists the grant funders for this federally-funded open access study.
"A Deep Learning Approach to Antibiotic Discovery" (2020) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.021
> Mutant generation
> Chemprop code is available at: https://github.com/swansonk14/chemprop
> Message Passing Neural Networks for Molecule Property Prediction
> A web-based version of the antibiotic prediction model described herein is available at: http://chemprop.csail.mit.edu/
> This website can be used to predict molecular properties using a Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN). In order to make predictions, an MPNN first needs to be trained on a dataset containing molecules along with known property values for each molecule. Once the MPNN is trained, it can be used to predict those same properties on any new molecules.
Shit – An implementation of Git using POSIX shell
Hiya HN. I was ranting on Mastodon earlier today because I feel like people learn git the wrong way - from the outside in, instead of the inside out. I reasoned that git internals are pretty simple and easy to understand, and that the supposedly obtuse interface makes a lot more sense when you approach it with an understanding of the fundamentals in hand. I said that the internals were so simple that you could implement a workable version of git using only shell scripts inside of an afternoon. So I wrapped up what I was working on and set out to prove it.
Five hours later, it had turned into less of a simple explanation of "look how simple these primitives are, we can create them with only a dozen lines of shell scripting!" and more into "oh fuck, I didn't realize that the git index is a binary file format". Then it became a personal challenge to try and make it work anyway, despite POSIX shell scripts clearly being totally unsuitable for manipulating that kind of data.
Anyway, this is awful, don't use it for anything, don't read the code, don't look at it, just don't.
> the supposedly obtuse interface makes a lot more sense when you approach it with an understanding of the fundamentals in hand.
Agreed. I always said the best git tutorial is https://www.sbf5.com/~cduan/technical/git/
> The conclusion I draw from this is that you can only really use Git if you understand how Git works. Merely memorizing which commands you should run at what times will work in the short run, but it’s only a matter of time before you get stuck or, worse, break something.
I never really understood Git until I read this tutorial: https://github.com/susam/gitpr
Things began to click for me as soon as I read this in its intro section:
> Beginners to this workflow should always remember that a Git branch is not a container of commits, but rather a lightweight moving pointer that points to a commit in the commit history.
A---B---C
↑
(master)
A---B---C---D
↑
(master)
This "moving pointer" model of Git branches led me to instant enlightenment. Now I can apply this model to other complicated operations too like conflict resolution during rebase, interactive rebase, force pushes, etc.
If I had to select a single most important concept in Git, I would say it is this: "A branch is merely a pointer to the tip of a series of commits."
And you can see this structure if you add to any "git log" command "--graph --oneline --decorate --color". IIRC some of those are unnecessary in recent versions of git, I just remember needing all of them at the point I started using it regularly.
I have a bash function for it (with a ton of other customizations, but it boils down to this):
function pwlog() {
git log "$@" --graph --oneline --decorate --color | less -SEXIER
}
pwlog --all -20
You can also set $GIT_PAGER/core.pager/$PAGER and create an alias to accomplish this:
#export PAGER='less -SEXIER'
#export GIT_PAGER='less -SEXIER'
git config --global core.pager 'less -SEXIER'
git config --global alias.l 'log --graph --oneline --decorate --color'
# git diff ~/.gitconfig
git l
> The order of preference is the $GIT_PAGER environment variable, then core.pager configuration, then $PAGER, and then the default chosen at compile time (usually less).
HTTP 402: Payment Required
The RFC offers no reasoning for this besides
> The 402 (Payment Required) status code is reserved for future use.
Isn't this obviously domain-specific and something that should not be part of the transfer protocol?
> The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least. https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
Salesforce Sustainability Cloud Becomes Generally Available
> - Reduce emissions with trusted analytics from a trusted platform. Analyzing carbon emissions from energy usage and company travel can be daunting and time-consuming. But with all your data flowing directly onto one platform, you can efficiently quantify your carbon footprint. Formulate a climate action plan for your company from a single source of truth, built on our trusted and secure data platform.
> - Take action with data-driven insights. Prove to customers, employees, and potential investors your commitment to carbon-conscious and sustainable practices. Offer regulatory agencies a clear snapshot of your energy usage patterns. Extrapolate energy consumption and track carbon emissions with cutting-edge analytics — and take action.
> - Tackle carbon accounting audits in weeks instead of months. Carbon analysis can be an overwhelming time commitment, even a barrier to action for companies that want to get it right. Use preloaded datasets from the U.S. EPA, IPCC, and others to accurately assess your carbon accounting. Streamline your data gathering and climate action plan with embedded guides and user flows.
> - Empower decision makers with executive-ready dashboard data. Evaluate corporate environmental impact with rich data visualization and dashboards. Track energy patterns and emission trends, then make the business case to executives. Once an organization understands its carbon footprint, decision makers can begin to drive sustainability solutions.
Are there similar services for Sustainability Reporting and accountability? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_reporting
Httpx: A next-generation HTTP client for Python
> Fully type annotated.
This is a huge win compare to requests. AFAIKT requests is too flexible (read: easier to misuse) and difficult to add type annotation now. The author of requests gave a horrible type annotation example here [0].
IMO at this time when you evaluate a new Python library before adopting, "having type annotation" should be as important as "having decent unit test coverage".
The huge win against requests is that Https is fully async.. you can download 20 files in parallel without not too much effort. Throughout in python asyncio is amazing, something similar to node or perhaps better... That's the main point.
FWIW, requests3 has "Type-annotations for all public-facing APIs", asyncio, HTTP/2, connection pooling, timeouts, etc https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests3
Sorry, have you checked the source? Are these features there or only announced? Has requests added a timeout by default finally?
It looks like requests is now owned by PSF. https://github.com/psf/requests
But IDK why requests3 wasn't transferred as well, and why issues appear to be disabled on the repo now.
The docs reference a timeout arg (that appears to default to the socket default timeout) for connect and/or read https://3.python-requests.org/user/advanced/#timeouts
And the tests reference a timeout argument. If that doesn't work, I wonder how much work it would be to send a PR (instead of just talking s to Ken and not contributing any code)
>But IDK why requests3 wasn't transferred as well, and
That's thing... Who knows..
TIL requests3 beta works with httpx as a backend: https://github.com/not-kennethreitz/team/issues/21#issuecomm...
If requests3 is installed, `import requests' imports requests3
BlackRock CEO: Climate Crisis Will Reshape Finance
+1. From the letter: https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/larry-fink-ceo-lette...
> The money we manage is not our own. It belongs to people in dozens of countries trying to finance long-term goals like retirement. And we have a deep responsibility to these institutions and individuals – who are shareholders in your company and thousands of others – to promote long-term value.
> Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasized the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity – a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.
> The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations – including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk – is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.
Environmental, social and corporate governance > Responsible investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...
Corporate social responsibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibilit...
UN-supported PRI: Principles for Responsible Investment (2,350 signatories (2019-04)) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_for_Responsible_Inv...
A lot of complex “scalable” systems can be done with a simple, single C++ server
Many developers severely underestimate how much workload can be served by a single modern server and high-quality C++ systems code. I've scaled distributed workloads 10x by moving them to a single server and a different software architecture more suited for scale-up, dramatically reducing system complexity as a bonus. The number of compute workloads I see that actually need scale-out is vanishingly small even in industries known for their data intensity. You can often serve millions of requests per second from a single server even when most of your data model resides on disk.
We've become so accustomed to extremely inefficient software systems that we've lost all perspective on what is possible.
Can you expand on this? I have some pretty massive compute loads that need to be scaled onto a cluster with 100+ workers for most computations. This is after I use a library called dask that graphically does its own mapreduce optimisation inside its modules. This is all for a relatively small 250GB raw data file that I keep in a csv (and need to convert to SQL at some point).
Are you saying this can be optimised to fit inside a single 10 core server in terms of compute loads?
Don't know why you're being downvoted but I'll assume your question is genuine.
You use a cluster when your data and compute requirements are large and parallel enough that the tax paid on network latency trumps the 10-20X speedup you get on SSD and 1000X speedup you get from just keeping data in RAM.
250 Gigs is tiny enough that you could probably much get better performance running on high memory instance in AWS or GCP. You'll generally have to write your own multiprocessing code though which is fairly simple - your existing library may also be able to support it.
I once actually ran this kind of workload on just my laptop using a compiled language that performed better than pyspark on a cluster.
I'd love to keep it in RAM if I could. The problem is, the library I'm familiar with (pandas) typically seems to take more memory than the original csv file once it loads it onto memory. I know this is due to bad data types but in certain cases, I cannot get around those.
However, even if I could load it all into memory at once, and assuming it takes 200 gb, I'm still using a master's student access to a cluster. So I get preempted like it's nobody's business. Hence why I prefer a smaller memory footprint even if I take up cpus at variable rates through a single execution.
I did try to write my own multiprocessing code for this, but the operations are sometimes too complicated (like groupby) for me to rewrite everything from the ground up. If I'm not reliant on serial data communication between processes (like you'd need to sort a column), I can get it done pretty easily. In fact, I wrote my data cleaning code with this and cleaned up the entire file in half an hour because single chunks didn't rely on others.
However, if you have some idea of how to run these computational loads in parallel in python or any other language on single compute instances (like the size of a laptop's memory of 16 gb), I'd really love to see it. Thanks.
Numpy supports memory mapping `ndarrays` which can back a DataFrame in pandas. This lets you access a dataset far larger than will fit in RAM as if it lived in RAM. Provided it's on fast SSD storage you'll have speedy access to the data and can process huge chunks at once.
Can you provide a link to this please? My current knowledge is that all numpy data lives in memory, and pandas itself has a feature to fragment any data into iterables so I can read upto my memory limit. I cannot use this feature due to the serial nature of some of the operations that I alluded to (I'd have to almost rewrite the entire library for some of these complicated operations like groupby and sorting).
I do have fast SSD storage because it's on the scratch drive of a cluster and from what I've seen it can do ~300-400 MB/s easily. I haven't had a chance to test more than that since I'm mostly memory constrained in much of my testing.
My current attempt is to push this data into a pure database handling system like SQL so that I can query it. But like I said, I work with a less-than-stellar set of tools and I have to literally set up a postgres server from ground up to write to it. Which shouldn't be a big deal except when it's on a non-root user and I have to keep remapping dependencies (took 5-6 hours to set it up on the instance I have access to).
My other option was to write the entire 250 GB to a sqllite database using the sqlalchemy library in Python, but that seems to fail whether I do it with parallel writes, or serial writes. In both cases, it fails after I create ~64-70 tables.
Dask groupby example: https://examples.dask.org/dataframes/02-groupby.html
> Generally speaking, Dask.dataframe groupby-aggregations are roughly same performance as Pandas groupby-aggregations, just more scalable.
The dask.distributed scheduler can also run on one high-RAM instance (with threads or processes) https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/setup.html
Pandas docs > Ecosystem > Out-of-core: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/ecosystem.html#...
Reading from Parquet into Apache Arrow is much faster than CSV because the data can just be directly loaded into RAM. https://ursalabs.org/blog/2019-10-columnar-perf/
If you have GPU instances, cuDF has a Pandas-like API on top of Apache Arrow. https://github.com/rapidsai/cudf
> Built based on the Apache Arrow columnar memory format, cuDF is a GPU DataFrame library for loading, joining, aggregating, filtering, and otherwise manipulating data.
> cuDF provides a pandas-like API that will be familiar to data engineers & data scientists, so they can use it to easily accelerate their workflows without going into the details of CUDA programming.
Dask-ML makes scalable scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow really easy. https://dask-ml.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
... re: the OT: While it's possible to write C++ code that's really fast, it's generally inflexible, expensive to develop, and dangerous for devs with experience in their respective domains of experience to write. Much saner to put a Python API on top and optimize that during compilation.
There are a few C++ frameworks in the top quartile of the TechEmpower framework benchmarks. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
Hardware/hosting is relatively cheap. Developers and memory vulnerabilities aren't.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what's wrong with dask, but it doesn't work properly on my cluster. I tested it on an exceedingly simple operation - find all unique values in a very big column (5 billion rows, but I know for a fact that there are only 500-502 unique values in there). With a 100 workers, it still failed. Now this is an embarrassingly parallel operation that can be implemented trivially. So I'm not sure if there's a problem with my cluster or if dask just does not work with slurm clusters very well.
https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/setup/hpc.html says dask-jobqueue handles "PBS, SLURM, LSF, SGE and other resource managers"
"Dask on HPC, what works and what doesn't" https://github.com/dask/dask-blog/issues/5
Maybe you should spend some time developing a job visualization system for end users from scratch, for end users with lots of C, JS, and HTML experience https://jobqueue.dask.org/en/latest/interactive.html
Yes, I think the library still isn't ready for non HPC experts to use without tinkering. I don't have that level of expertise. I'm a data person who can handle working tools.
Warren Buffett is spending billions to make Iowa 'the Saudi Arabia of wind'
It's both cost-rational and environment-rational to invest heavily in clean energy (with or without the comparatively paltry tax incentives).
The long-term costs of climate change and inaction are unfortunately still mostly external costs to energy producers. We should expect that to change as we start developing competencies in evaluating the costs and frequency of weather disasters exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. We all get to pay for floods, fires, tornados, hurricanes, landslides, blizzards, and the gosh darn heat.
Insurance firms clearly see these costs. Our military sees the costs of responding to natural disasters. Local economies see the costs of months and years spent on disaster relief; on just getting back up to speed so that they can generate profit from selling goods and services (and pay taxes to support disaster relief efforts essential to operational readiness).
The cost per kilowatt hour of wind (and solar) energy is now lower than operating existing dirty energy plants that dump soot on our crops, air, and water.
With wind, they talk about the "alligator curve". With solar, it's the "duck curve". Grid-scale energy storage is necessary for reaching 100% renewable energy as soon as possible.
Iowa's renewable energy tax incentives are logically aligned with international long-term goals:
UN Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy https://www.globalgoals.org/7-affordable-and-clean-energy
Goal 13: Climate Action https://www.globalgoals.org/13-climate-action
SDG Target 12.6: "Encourage companies to adopt sustainable practices and sustainability reporting" (CSR; e.g. GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards that we can score portfolios with)
https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-develo... :
> Rationalize inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption by removing market distortions, in accordance with national circumstances, including by restructuring taxation and phasing out those harmful subsidies, where they exist, to reflect their environmental impacts, taking fully into account the specific needs and conditions of developing countries and minimizing the possible adverse impacts on their development in a manner that protects the poor and the affected communities
...
> Thanks. How can I say "try and only run this [computational workload] in zones with 100% PPA offsets or 100% directly sourced #CleanEnergy"? #Goal7 #Goal11 #Goal12 #Goal13 #GlobalGoals #SDGs
It makes good business sense to invest in clean energy to take advantage of tax incentives, minimize future costs to other business units (e.g. insurance, taxes), and earn the support of investors choosing portfolios with long term environmental (and thus economic) sustainability as a primary objective.
Scientists Likely Found Way to Grow New Teeth for Patients
"Scientists Have Discovered a Drug That Fixes Cavities and Regrows Teeth" https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-have-discovered-thi...
Tideglusib https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tideglusib
> Tooth repair mechanisms that promotes dentine reinforcement of a sponge structure until the sponge biodegrades, leaving a solid dentine structure. In 2016, the results of animal studies were reported in which 0.14 mm holes in mouse teeth were permanently filled.
Very interesting mechanism.
GSK3 inhibitors are interesting, but we don't understand much the subtypes that are likely to exist: "GSK-3 appears to both promote and inhibit apoptosis, and this regulation varies depending on the specific molecular and cellular context."
Still, I believe better GSK3i will find a role in autologous bone-marrow grafting therapies to fight senescence: with TERC/TERT overexpression (the opposite of DeGrey WILT ideas) to send new stem cells to the tissues - just like how you can find the donors chromosomes in most tissues of grafted patient.
Announcing the New PubMed
I'm actually part of the team developing the new PubMed. Very curious and interested to know what the hacker news community thinks and feels about their experience. https://pubmed.gov/labs
This looks great: I like the search timeline, the ability to easily search for free full-text meta-analyses (a selection bias we should all be aware of), the MeSH term listing in a reasonably-sized font, and that there's schema.org/ImageObject metadata within the page, but there's no [Medical]ScholarlyArticle metadata?
I've worked with Google Scholar (:o) [1], Semantic Scholar (Allen Institute for AI) [2], Meta (Chan Zuckerberg Institute) [3], Zotero, Mendeley and a number of other tools for indexing and extracting metadata and graph relations from https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle and MedicalScholarlyArticles . Without RDFa (or Microdata, or JSON-LD) in PDF, there's a lot of parsing that has to go down in order to get a graph from the citations in the article. Each service adds value to this graph of resources. Pushing forward on publishing linked research that's reproducible (#LinkedResearch, #LinkedReproducibility) is a worthwhile investment in meta-research that we have barely yet addressed:
> http://Schema.org/NewsArticle .citation: https://schema.org/citation ... Wouldn't it be great if NewsArticles linked to the ScholarlyArticle and/or Notebook CreativeWorks that they're .about (with reified relations)?
> A practical use case: Alice wants to publish a ScholarlyArticle [1] (in HTML with structured data, as a PDF) predicated upon Datasets [2] (as CSV, CSVW JSONLD, XLSX (DataDownload)) with static HTML (and no special HTTP headers). 1 https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle 2 https://schema.org/Dataset*
> B wants to build a meta analysis: to collect a # of ScholarlyArticles and Dataset DataDownloads; review study controls and data; merge, join, & concatenate Datasets if appropriate, and inductively or deductively infer a conclusion and suggestions for further studies of variance*
The Linked Open Data Cloud shows the edges, the relations, the structured data links between very many (life sciences) datasets: https://lod-cloud.net/ . https://5stardata.info/en/ lists TimBL's suggested 5-start deployment schema for Open Data; which culuminates in publishing linked open data in non-proprietary formats that uses URIs to describe and link to things.
Could any of these [1][2][3][4][5] services cross-link the described resources, given a common URI identifier such as https://schema.org/identifier and/or https://schema.org/url ? ORCID is a service for generating stable identifiers for researchers and publishers who have names in common but different emails. W3C DID solves for this need in a different way.
When I check an article result page with the OpenLink OSDS extension (or any of a number of other tools for extracting structured data from HTML pages (and documents!) https://github.com/CodeForAntarctica/codeforantarctica.githu... ), there could be quite a bit more data there for search engines, browser extensions, and meta-research tools.
Is this something like ElasticSearch on the backend? It is possible to store JSON-LD documents in the search index. I threw together elasticsearchjsonld to "Generate JSON-LD @contexts from ElasticSearch JSON Mappings" for the OpenFDA FAERS data a few year ago. That's not GraphQL or SPARQL, but it's something and it's Linked Data.
re: "Canada's Decision To Make Public More Clinical Trial Data Puts Pressure On FDA" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21232183
> We really could get more out of this data through international collaboration and through linked data (e.g. URIs for columns). See: "Open, and Linked, FDA data" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/5#issuecomment-5392966... and "ENH: Adverse Event Count / 'Use' Count Heatmap" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/49 . With sales/usage counts, we'd have a denominator with which we could calculate relative hazard.
W3C Web Annotations handle threaded comments and highlights; reviewing the reviewers is left as an exercise for the reader. Does Zotero still make it easy to save the bibliographic metadata for one or more ScholarlyArticles from PubMed to a collection in the cloud (and add metadata/annotations)?
Sorry to toot my own horn here. Great job on this. This opens up many new opportunities for research.
[1] https://scholar.google.com
[2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/
Pubmed publishes its dataset for download. Its rather large but update files come frequently. Its amazing. I beleive NIH adds the MESH terms.
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
We had someone do a project with it. downloaded the dataset and used it and create a tool to do some searches that we found useful to find colaborators: (last author, working on a specific gene, paper counts, most recent).
Searching by Mesh Terms across species, and search with orthologs.
The dataset sometimes has a hard time disambiguating names (I think the european dataset assigns Ids to names)
To make sure your feedback is heard, please use "Feedback button" found in bottom right corner of https://pubmed.gov/labs
Ask HN: Is it worth it to learn C in 2020?
The GNU/Linux kernel, FreeBSD kernel, Windows kernel, MacOS kernel, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, NodeJS, and NumPy are all written in C. If you want to review and contribute code, you'd need to learn C.
There are a number of coding guidelines e.g. for safety-critical systems where bounded running time and resource consumption are essential. These coding guidelines and standards are basically only available for C, C++, and Ada. https://github.com/stanislaw/awesome-safety-critical/blob/ma...
Even though modern languages have garbage-collection that runs whenever it feels like it, It's helpful to learn about memory management in C (or C++). You'll appreciate object destructor methods that free memory and sockets and file handles that much more. Reference cycles in object graphs are easier to handle with modern C++ than with C. Are there RAII (Resource Acquisition is Initialization) "smart pointers" that track reference counts in C?
Without OO namespacing, in C, function names are often prefixed with namespaces. How many ways could a struct be initialized? When can I free that memory?
When strace prints a syscall, what is that?
Is it necessary to learn C? Somebody needs to maintain and improve the C-based foundation for most of our OSs and very many of our fancy scripting languages. C can be very unforgiving: it's really easy to do it wrong, and there's a lot to keep in mind at once: the cognitive burden is higher with C (and then still with ASM and WebASM) than with an interpreted (or compiled) duck-typed 3GL scripting language with first-class functions.
What's a good progression that includes syntax, finding and reading the libc docs, Make/CMake/Autotools, secure recommended compiler flags for GCC (CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS) and LLVM Clang?
C: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c/
C++: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c++/
Links to the docs for Libc and other tools: https://westurner.github.io/tools/#libc
xeus-cling is a Jupyter kernel for C++ (and most of C) that works with nbgrader. https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus-cling
What's a better unit-testing library for C/C++ than gtest? https://github.com/google/googletest/
Amazing comment, thank you for your detailed input and the awesome resources. I want to get into C because I like network and system programming but lack the underlying knowledge and experience. These links will help me start on that new path. Very much appreciated sir :)
For network programming, you might consider asynchronous programming with coroutines. C++20 has them and they're already supported in LLVM. For C, there are a number of implementations of coroutines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coroutine#Implementations_for_...
> Once a second call stack has been obtained with one of the methods listed above, the setjmp and longjmp functions in the standard C library can then be used to implement the switches between coroutines. These functions save and restore, respectively, the stack pointer, program counter, callee-saved registers, and any other internal state as required by the ABI, such that returning to a coroutine after having yielded restores all the state that would be restored upon returning from a function call. Minimalist implementations, which do not piggyback off the setjmp and longjmp functions, may achieve the same result via a small block of inline assembly which swaps merely the stack pointer and program counter, and clobbers all other registers. This can be significantly faster, as setjmp and longjmp must conservatively store all registers which may be in use according to the ABI, whereas the clobber method allows the compiler to store (by spilling to the stack) only what it knows is actually in use.
CPython's asyncio implementation (originally codenamed 'tulip') is written in C and IMHO much easier to use than callbacks like Twisted and JS before Promises and the inclusion of tulip-like async/await keywords in ECMAscript. Uvloop - based on libuv, like Node - is apparently the fastest asyncio event loop. CPython Asyncio C module source: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Modules/_async... Asyncio docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html
(When things like file or network I/O are I/O bound, the program can yield to allow other asynchronous coroutines ('async') to run on that core. With network programming, we're typically waiting for things to send or reply.)
Return-oriented-programming > Return-into-library technique is an interesting read regarding system programming :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return-oriented_programming#Re...
Free and Open-Source Mathematics Textbooks
This is a good list of books. Unfortunately many of the links are broken? Probably just my luck, but the first few "with Sage" books I excitedly selected unfortunately 404'd. I'll send an email.
> Moreover, the American Institute of Mathematics maintains a list of approved open-source textbooks. https://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/
I also like the (free) Green Tea Press books: Think Stats, Think Bayes, Think DSP, Think Complexity, Modeling and Simulation in Python, Think Python 2e: How To Think Like a Computer Scientist https://greenteapress.com/wp/
And IDK how many times I've recommended the book for the OCW "Mathematics for Computer Science" course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
There may be a newer edition than the 2017 version of the book: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring17/mcs.pdf
Does anyone have a good strategy for archiving and downloading the textbooks from aimath.org? They are all excellently formatted in HTML, but I am not certain what the best way to get the complete book would be.
When I have books in form of webpages I normally write a small crawler in python, extract the text div with beautifulsoup, add <hn> tags for chapter names and throw them all together in html form. Add a cover image and combine everything with pandoc.
Nothing fancy but works reliable in an automated fashion
I've found MIT's "Mathematics for Computer Science" actually hard to read, and in my opinion it cannot really be called a proper book, more like a collection of notes, as it skips over many details, jumping to conclusions, definitions, results, without giving you an intuitive explanation. In that regards it's actually hard to follow.
It's fast-going. You may want to start with something more introductory, like:
Levin http://discrete.openmathbooks.org/dmoi3.html
Hammack https://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/
the early parts of Newstead https://infinitedescent.xyz/
Make CPython segfault in 5 lines of code
Applications Are Now Open for YC Startup School – Starts in January
I'm presently living in a fairly rural part of the US due to an illness in the family. In the town of 14,000 I currently reside in it's pretty difficult to network in a meaningful way and talk about my company with folks that can give guidance and feedback. Really excited for Startup School and so grateful that YC has put this together.
> In the town of 14,000 I currently reside in it's pretty difficult to network in a meaningful way and talk about my company with folks that can give guidance and feedback
GitLab and Zapier are examples of all remote former YC companies.
"GitLab Handbook" https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
"The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work: Lessons from a team of over 200 remote workers" https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/
Were those companies remote when they did YC? I can't recall exactly where offhand but I seem to remember Paul Graham (or was it Sam Altman?) saying that they were strongly against remote teams in the early stages. It was a few years ago though, I wonder if their opinions have changed.
Startup School is now designed as a remote program.
It'd be interesting to hear from them about building all remote team culture with transparency and accountability. Are text-chat "digital stand up meetings" with quality transcripts of each team member's responses to the three questions enough? ( Yesterday / Today and Tomorrow / Obstacles // What did I do since the last time we met? What will I do before the next time we meet? What obstacles are blocking my progress? )
Or are there longer term planning sessions focusing on a plan for delivering value on a far longer term than first getting the MVP down and maximizing marginal profit by minimizing costs?
‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that
+1 for Life Skills for Adulting and also Home Economics including Family and Meal Planning.
A bunch of resources from "Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894632 : CS 007: Personal Finance for Engineers, r/personalfinance/wiki, Healthy Eating Plate, Khan Academy > Science > Health and Medicine
And also, Instant Pot. The Instant Pot pressure cooker is your key to nutrient preservation and ultimate happiness.
Founder came back after 8 years to rewrite flash photoshop in canvas/WebGL
Five cities account for vast majority of growth in U.S. tech jobs: study
> Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego—accounted for more than 90% of the nation’s innovation-sector growth during the years 2005 to 2017
Why 2005 and why'd it drop off post-2017?
Also surprised DC and NYC aren't on the list. Lots of new companies and growth in those areas, but I guess they may not qualify as "innovation-sector growth".
> To that end, the present paper proposes that Congress assemble and award to a select set of metropolitan areas a major package of federal innovation inputs and supports that would accelerate their innovation-sector scale-up. Along these lines, we envision Congress establishing a rigorous competitive process by which the most promising eight to 10 potential growth centers would receive substantial financial and regulatory support for 10 years to become self-sustaining new innovation centers. Such an initiative would not only bring significant economic opportunity to more parts of the nation, but also boost U.S. competitiveness on the global stage.
"Potential growth centers" sounds promising.
Don’t Blame Tech Bros for the Housing Crisis
If there is demand for housing, we would expect people to be finding land and building housing unless there are policies that prevent this (and/or long commutes that people don't want to suffer) or higher-value opportunities.
If the city wanted residential areas (over commercial tax revenue giants), the city should have zoned residential.
The people elect city leaders. The people all want affordable housing.
With $4.5b from corporations and nowhere to build but out or up, high rise residential is the most likely outcome. (Which is typical for dense urban areas that have prioritized and attracted corporate tax revenue over affordable housing)
... Effing scooter bros with their scooters and their gold rush money and their tiny houses.
[Edit: more than] One company says "I will pay you $10,000 to leave the Bay Area / Silicon Valley" Because there's a lot of tech talent (because universities and opportunities) but ridiculously high expenses.
What an effectual headline from NY.
Docker is just static linking for millenials
No, LXC does quite a bit more than static linking. An inability to recognize that likely has nothing to do with generation.
Can you launch a process in a chroot, with cgroups? Okay, now upgrade everything it's linked with (without breaking the host/build system)
Configure a host-only network for a few processes – running in separate cgroups – without DHCP.
Criticize Docker? Rootless builds and containers are essentially impossible. Buildah and podman make rootless builds possible without a socket. Like sysvinit, though, IDK how well centralized logging (and logshipping, and logged crashes and restarts) works without that socket.
Given comments like this, it's likely that you've never built a chroot for a different distro. Or launchd a process with cgroups.
Show HN: Bamboolib – A GUI for Pandas (Python Data Science)
This looks excellent. The ability to generate the Python code for the pandas dataframe transformations looks to be more useful than OpenRefine, TBH.
How much work would it be to use Dask (and Dask-ML) as a backend?
I see the OneHotEncoder button. Have you considered integration with Yellowbrick? They've probably already implemented a few of your near-future and someday roadmap items involving hyperparameter selection and model selection and visualization? https://www.scikit-yb.org/en/latest/
This video shows more of the advanced bamboolib features: https://youtu.be/I0a58h1OCcg
The live histogram rebinning looks useful. Recently I read about a 'shadowgram' / ~KDE approach with very many possible bin widths translucently overlaid in one chart. https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/68999/how-to-smear...
Yellowbrick also has a bin width optimization visualization in yellowbrick.target.binning.BalancedBinningReference: https://www.scikit-yb.org/en/latest/api/target/binning.html
Great work.
Thank you for your feedback and support :) Are you currently using OpenRefine?
We are currently thinking about providing other dataframe libraries like dask or pyspark and similar. However, we are a little bit unsure on how to make sure that there is user demand before we implement it. It is not a complete rewrite but it would require some additional abstractions at some points in the library. And we need to check if some features might not be available any more. Would dask support be a reason to buy for you?
Great hint with yellowbrick and yes, we are considering some of those features as well if there is a useful place in the library.
In general, we are also thinking about ways how you can extend the library for yourself so that you can add your own analyses/charts of choice and then they will come up again the right point in time. In case that this is useful.
In the past, I've looked at OpenRefine and Jupyter integration. Once I've learned to do data transformation with pandas and sklearn with code, I'll report back to you.
Pandas-profiling has a number of cool descriptive statistics features as well. https://github.com/pandas-profiling/pandas-profiling
There's a new IterativeImputer in Scikit-learn 0.22 that it'd be cool to see visualizations of. https://twitter.com/TedPetrou/status/1197150813707108352 https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/impute.html
A plugin model would be cool; though configuring the container every time wouldn't be fun. Some ideas about how we could create a desktop version of binderhub in order to launch REES-compatible environments on our own resources: https://github.com/westurner/nbhandler/issues/1
Dask has only a subset of Pandas available.
Could you send me a link to the docs where they say which ones are not included in Pandas? Would love to take a closer look at his.
Set difference and/or intersection of dir(pd.DataFrame) and dir(dask.DataFrame) with inspect.getargspec and inspect.doc would be a useful document for either or both projects.
pyfilemods generates a ReStructuredText document with introspected API comparisons. "Identify and compare Python file functions/methods and attributes from os, os.path, shutil, pathlib, and path.py" https://github.com/westurner/pyfilemods
Battery-Electric Heavy-Duty Equipment: It's Sort of Like a Cybertruck
> They’ve created a single platform that can be easily modified to do any number of jobs. For instance, their flagship product, the Dannar 4.00, can accept over 250 attachments from CAT, John Deere, or Bobcat. […] Having interoperability with so many different types of equipment, one platform can easily perform many tasks over the course of a year. This is a huge win for cash strapped municipalities. Why would a company or municipality opt to have a backhoe parked all winter long when it could be doing another job?
Does it have regenerative brakes?
Tools for turning descriptions into diagrams: text-to-picture resources
There's a sphinx extension (sphinxcontrib-sdedit) [1] for sdedit ("Quick Sequence Diagram Editor") which does require Java [2].
CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility
> Proponents argue that corporations increase long-term profits by operating with a CSR perspective, while critics argue that CSR distracts from businesses' economic role.
... The 3 Pillars of Corporate Sustainability: Environmental, Social, Economic https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/100515/three...
Three dimensions of sustainability: (Environment (Society (Economy))) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability#Three_dimension...
What are some of the corporate sustainability reporting standards?
How can I score a candidate portfolio with sustainability metrics in order to impact invest with maximum impact?
> What are some of the corporate sustainability reporting standards?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_reporting#Initi... :
>> Organizations can improve their sustainability performance by measuring (EthicalQuote (CEQ)), monitoring and reporting on it, helping them have a positive impact on society, the economy, and a sustainable future. The key drivers for the quality of sustainability reports are the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI),[3] (ACCA) award schemes or rankings. The GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines enable all organizations worldwide to assess their sustainability performance and disclose the results in a similar way to financial reporting.[4] The largest database of corporate sustainability reports can be found on the website of the United Nations Global Compact initiative.
The GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) Standards are now aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Reporting_Initiative
>> In 2017, 63 percent of the largest 100 companies (N100), and 75 percent of the Global Fortune 250 (G250) reported applying the GRI reporting framework.[3]
> How can I score a candidate portfolio with sustainability metrics in order to impact invest with maximum impact?
Does anybody have solutions for this? AFAIU, existing cleantech funds are more hand-picked than screened according to sustainability fundamentals.
GTD Tickler file – a proposal for text file format
Taskwarrior is also built upon the todo.txt format. [1]
Taskw supports various task dates – { due: scheduled: wait: until: recur: } [2]
Taskw supports various named dates like soq/eocq, som/eom (start/end of [current] quarter, start/end of month), tomorrow, later [3]
Taskw recurring tasks (recur:) use the duration syntax: weekly/wk/w, monthly/mo, quarterly/qtr, yearly/yr, … [4]
Pandas has a "date offset" "frequency string" microsyntax that supports business days, quarters, and years; e.g. BQuarterEnd, BQuarterBegin [5]
IDK how usable by other tools these date string parsers are.
W/ just a text editor, having `todo.txt`, `daily.todo.txt`, and `weekly.todo.txt` (and `cleanhome.todo.txt` and `hygiene.todo.txt` with "## heading" tasks that get lost @where +sorting) works okay.
I have physical 43 folders, too: A 12 month and a 31 day expanding file. [6]
[2] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/using_dates.html
[3] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/named_dates.html
[4] https://taskwarrior.org/docs/durations.html
[5] https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/user_guide/time...
Ask HN: Any suggestion on how to test CLI applications?
Hello HN!
I've been looking at alternatives on how to test command line applications, specifically, for example, exit codes, output messages and whatnot. I've seen "bats" https://github.com/sstephenson/bats and Bazel for testing but I'm curious as what other tools people use in a day to day basis. UI testing is nice with tools like Cypress.io and maybe there's something out there that isn't as popular but it's useful.
Thoughts?
pytest-docker-pexpect: https://github.com/nvbn/pytest-docker-pexpect
Pexpect: https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
pytest with subprocess.popen (or Sarge) may be sufficient for checking return codes and checking stdout and stderr output streams. Pytest has tmp_path and tmpdir fixtures that provide less test isolation than Docker containers: http://doc.pytest.org/en/latest/tmpdir.html
sarge.Capture.expect() takes a regex and returns None if there's no match: https://sarge.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#looking...
The Golden Butterfly and the All Weather Portfolio
The Golden Butterfly (is a modified All Weather Portfolio)
> Stocks: 20% Domestic Large Cap Fund (Vanguard’s VTI or Goldman Sach’s JUST), 20% Domestic Small Cap Value (Vanguard’s VBR)
> Bonds: 20% Long Term (Vanguard’s BLV), 20% Short Term (Vanguard’s BSV)
> Real Assets: 20% Gold (SPDR’s GLD)
The All Weather Portfolio:
> Stocks: 30% Domestic Total Stock Market (VG total stock)
> Bonds: 40% Long Term, 15% Intermediate-Term
> Real Assets: 7.5% Commodities, 7.5% Gold
Canada's Decision To Make Public More Clinical Trial Data Puts Pressure On FDA
We really could get more out of this data through international collaboration and through linked data (e.g. URIs for columns). See: "Open, and Linked, FDA data" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/5#issuecomment-5392966... and "ENH: Adverse Event Count / 'Use' Count Heatmap" https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/49
With sales/usage counts, we'd have a denominator with which we could calculate relative hazard.
Python Alternative to Docker
Shiv does not solve for what containers and Docker/Podman/Buildah/Containerd solve for: re-launching processes at boot and failure, launching processes in chroots or cgroups (with least privileges), limiting access to network ports, limiting access to the host filesystem, building chroots / images, [...]
You can run build tools like shiv with a RUN instruction in a Dockerfile and get some caching.
You can build a zipapp with shiv (in a build container) and run the zipapp in a container.
Should the zipapp contain the test suite(s) and test_requires so that the tests can be run in an environment most similar to production?
It's much easier to develop with code on the filesystem (instead of in a zipapp).
It's definitely faster to read the whole zipapp into RAM than to stat and read each imported module from the filesystem once at startup.
There may be a better post title than the current "Python Alternative to Docker"? Shiv is a packaging utility for building Python zipapps. Shiv is not an alternative to process isolation with containers (or VMs)
$6B United Nations Agency Launches Bitcoin, Ethereum Crypto Fund
"UNICEF launches Cryptocurrency Fund: UN Children’s agency becomes first UN Organization to hold and make transactions in cryptocurrency" https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-launches-crypto...
From https://www.unicefusa.org/ :
> UNICEF USA helps save and protect the world's most vulnerable children. UNICEF USA is rated one of the best charities to donate to: 89% of every dollar spent goes directly to help children.
Timsort, the Python sorting algorithm
Here are the Python 3 docs for sorting [1], in-place list.sort() [2], and sorted() [3] (which makes a sorted copy of the references). And the Timsort Wikipedia page [4].
[1] https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sorting.html#sort-stability-...
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#list.sort
Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if websites aren't accessible
"a11y": Accessibility
https://a11yproject.com/ has patterns, a checklist for checking web accessibility, resources, and events.
awesome-a11y has a list of a number of great resources for developing accessible applications: https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y
In terms of W3C specifications [1], you've got: WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative: Accessibile Rich Internet Applications) [2], and WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [3]. The new W3C Payment Request API [4] makes it easy for browsers to offer a standard (and probably(?) already accessible) interface for the payment data entry screen, at least.
There are a number of automated accessibility testing platforms. "[W3C WAI] Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List" [5] lists quite a few. Can someone recommend a good accessibility testing tools? Is Google Lighthouse (now included with Chrome Devtools and as a standalone script) a good tool for accessibility reviews?
[1] https://github.com/brunopulis/awesome-a11y/blob/master/topic...
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/using-aria/
[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
Streamlit: Turn a Python script into an interactive data analysis tool
Cool!
requests_cache caches HTML requests into one SQLite database. [1] pandas-datareader can cache external data requests with requests-cache. [2]
dask.cache can do opportunistic caching (of 2GB of data). [3]
How does streamlit compare to jupyter voila dashboards (with widgets and callbacks)? They just launched a new separate github org for the project. [4] There's a gallery of voila dashboard examples. [5]
> Voila serves live Jupyter notebooks including Jupyter interactive widgets.
> Unlike the usual HTML-converted notebooks, each user connecting to the Voila tornado application gets a dedicated Jupyter kernel which can execute the callbacks to changes in Jupyter interactive widgets.
> - By default, voila disallows execute requests from the front-end, preventing execution of arbitrary code.
[1] https://github.com/reclosedev/requests-cache
[2] https://pandas-datareader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cache.htm...
[3] https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/caching.html
[4] https://github.com/voila-dashboards/voila
[5] https://blog.jupyter.org/a-gallery-of-voil%C3%A0-examples-a2...
Acess control and resource exhaustion are challenges with building any {Flask, framework_x,} app [from Jupyter notebooks]. First it's "HTTP Digest authentication should be enough for now"; then it's "let's use SSO and LDAP" (and review every release); then it's "why is it so sloww?". JupyterHub has authentication backends, spawners, and per-user-container/vm resource limits.
> Each user on your JupyterHub gets a slice of memory and CPU to use. There are two ways to specify how much users get to use: resource guarantees and resource limits. [6]
[6] https://zero-to-jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user-res...
Some notes re: voila and JupyterHub:
> The reason for having a single instance running voila only is to allow non JupyterHub users to have access to the dashboards. So without going through the Hub auth flow.
> What are the requirements in your case? Voila can be installed in the single user Docker image, so that each user can also use it on their own server (as a server extension for example). [7]
Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ
Who even asked these questions?
I question this. All of this.
Literally people on HN have been asking many of these questions for years whenever QC is discussed.
Ask HN: How do you handle/maintain local Python environments?
I'm having some trouble figuring out how to handle my local Python. I'm not asking about 2 vs 3 - that ship has sailed - I'm confused on which binary to be using. From the way I see it, there's at least 4 different Pythons I could be using:
1 - Python shipped with OS X/Ubuntu
2 - brew/apt install python
3 - Anaconda
4 - Getting Python from https://www.python.org/downloads/
And that's before getting into how you get numpy et al installed. What's the general consensus on which to use? It seems like the OS X default is compiled with Clang while brew's version is with GCC. I've been working through this book [1] and found this thread [2]. I really want to make sure I'm using fast/optimized linear algebra libraries, is there an easy way to make sure? I use Python for learning data science/bioinformatics, learning MicroPython for embedded, and general automation stuff - is it possible to have one environment that performs well for all of these?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Analysis-Wrangling-IPython/dp/1449319793
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/46r8u0/numpylinalgsolve_is_6x_faster_on_my_mac_than_on/
I just use Anaconda. It's basically the final word in monolithic Python distributions.
For data science/numerical computation, all batteries included. It also has fast optimized linear algebra (MKL) plus extras like dask (paralellization), numba, out of the box. No fuss no muss. No need to fiddle with anything.
Everything else is a "pip install" or "conda install" away. Virtual envs? Has it. Run different Python versions on the same machine via conda environments? Has it. Web dev with Django etc.? All there. Need to containerize? miniconda.
The only downside? It's quite big and takes a while to install. But it's a one time cost.
I also prefer conda for the same reasons.
Precompiled MKL is really nice. Conda and conda-forge now build for aarch64. There are very few wheels for aarch64 on PyPI. Conda can install things like Qt (IPython-qt, spyder,) and NodeJS (JupyterLab extensions).
If I want to switch python versions for a given condaenv (instead of just creating a new condaenv for a different CPython/PyPy version), I can just run e.g. `conda install -y python=3.7` and it'll reinstall everything in the depgraph that depended on the previous python version.
I always just install miniconda instead of the whole anaconda distribution. I always create condaenvs (and avoid installing anything in the root condaenv) so that I can `conda-env export -f environment.yml` and clean that up.
BinderHub ( https://mybinder.org/ ) creates docker containers from {git repos, Zenodo, FigShare,} and launches them in free cloud instances also running JupyterLab by building containers with repo2docker (with REES (Reproducible Execution Environment Specification)). This means that all I have to do is add an environment.yml to my git repo in order to get Binder support so that people can just click on the badge in the README to launch JupyterLab with all of the dependencies installed.
REES supports a number of dependency specifications: requirements.txt, Pipfile.lock, environment.yml, aptSources, postBuild. With an environment.yml, I can install the necessary CPython/PyPy version and everything else.
...
In my dotfiles, I have a setup_miniconda.sh script that installs miniconda into per-CPython-version CONDA_ROOT and then creates a CONDA_ENVS_PATH for the condaenvs. It may be overkill because I could just specify a different python version for all of the conda envs in one CONDA_ENVS_PATH, but it keeps things relatively organized and easily diffable: CONDA_ROOT="~/-wrk/-conda37" CONDA_ENVS_PATH="~/-wrk/-ce37"
I run `_setup_conda 37; workon_conda|wec dotfiles` to work on the ~/-wrk/-ce37/dotfiles condaenv and set _WRD=~/-wrk/-ce37/dotfiles/src/dotfiles.
Similarly, for virtualenvwrapper virtualenvs, I run `WORKON_HOME=~/-wrk/-ve37 workon|we dotfiles` to set all of the venv cdaliases; i.e. then _WRD="~/-wrk/-ve37/dotfiles/src/dotfiles" and I can just type `cdwrd|cdw` to cd to the working directory. (Some of the other cdaliases are: {cdwrk, cdve|cdce, cdvirtualenv|cdv, cdsrc|cds}. So far, I have implemented cdalias support for bash, IPython, and vim)
One nice thing about defining _WRD is I can run `makew <tab>` and `gitw` to `cd $_WRD; make <tab>` and `git -C $_WRD` without having to change directory and then `cd -` to return to where I was.
So, for development, I use a combination of virtualenvwrapper, pipsi, conda, and some shell scripts in my dotfiles that I should get around to releasing and maintaining someday. https://westurner.github.io/dotfiles/venv
For publishing projects, I like environment.yml because of the REES support.
Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?
For $100, you can buy a Pinebook with an 11" or 14" screen, a multitouch trackpad, gigabytes of storage, WiFi, a keyboard without a numpad, and an ARM processor.
On this machine, you can create reproducible analyses with JupyterLab; do arithmetic with Python; work with multidimensional arrays with NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, xarray, Dask; do machine learning with Statsmodels, Scikit-learn, Dask-ML, TPOT; create books of these notebooks (containing code and notes (in Markdown, which easily transformed to HTML) and LaTeX equations) with jupyter-book, nbsphinx, git + BinderHub; store the revision history of your discoveries; publish what you've discovered and learned to public or private git repositories; and complete graded exercises with nbgrader.
But the task is to prepare for a world of mental arithmetic, no validation, no tests, no reference materials, and no search engines; and CAS (Computer Algebra Systems) systems like SymPy and Sage are not allowed.
On this machine, you can run write code, write papers, build spreadsheets and/or Jupyter notebooks, run physical simulations, explore the stars, and play games and watch videos. Videos like: Khan Academy videos and exercises that you can watch and do, with validation, until you've achieved mastery and move on to the next task on your todo.txt list.
But the task is to preserve your creativity and natural curiosity despite the compulsory education system's demands for quality control and allocative efficiency; in an environment where drama and popularity are the solutions to relatedness and acceptance needs.
I have three of these $100 calculators in my toolbox. It's been so long since I've powered them on that I'm concerned that the rechargeable AAA batteries are leaking battery acid.
For $100, you can buy an ARM notebook and install conda and conda-forge packages and build sweet visualizations to collaborate with colleagues on (with Seaborn (matplotlib), HoloViews, Altair, Plotly)
"You must buy a $100 calculator that only runs BASIC and ASM, and only use it for arithmetic so that we can measure you."
Hand tools are fun, but please don't waste any more of my compulsory time.
I would LOVE to live in a world where Jupyter notebooks are the defacto standard for post-primary education. It would take some vision and leadership to bring about that sort of change, but would far better prepare kids for the world they will be running one day.
Reinventing Home Directories
Full Disclosure: I am violently opposed to systemd and pulseaudio (before it was taken away from Poettering).
However, I think I'm seeing a pattern, Poettering identifies real issues and actually tries to fix them.
But it seems like his ambition is impeding his ability to consider those who do not want to approach the fix his way. It's never a measured approach, it /feels/ like a "lets write it now and figure out all the problems down the line and fix them" which, for core pieces of software is a dangerous mindset.
After watching the intro here I agree with him, the current state of things is not ideal, and nobody _wants_ to touch user account management on Linux. On MacOS for example, it's much more thought out, and I think Linux could do it better.
As much as I hate poetterings specific approaches (and, subsequent lockout) I have to give credit to him identifying these issues and actually trying to fix them, it's more than I do. Then again I am a lowly sysadmin type.
I like the tone of your comment, unlike many others here. But to your remark:
"But it seems like his ambition is impeding his ability to consider those who do not want to approach the fix his way. It's never a measured approach, it /feels/ like a "lets write it now and figure out all the problems down the line and fix them" which, for core pieces of software is a dangerous mindset."
I'd like to say that he forces nobody and so we should not complain about his creative endeavors. The market will decide, and you, will decide.
I disagree, you can argue the semantics of if it's him specifically or if it's another project that decides it will only target systemd/pulseaudio. But the fact that if I want a stable distro for server usage in 2019 I _must_ use a systemd distro speaks to the fact that I am indeed forced to use it.
Maybe that's just adoption though, typically the sysadmin community considers the "safe" options to be CentOS/RHEL or Debian Stable. Both of which default to systemd. (and no sysadmin is going to change the init system on production servers unless it presents some abject nightmare, short of eating 30% CPU/Mem-- it's core software, it wont be touched).
Projects like Devuan are simply not considered safe choices by the majority of the sysadmin community, and there's no alternative for RHEL-esque sites.
So, semantically: it's not poetterings fault. But at the same time, I'm still forced.
Sorry, but you'll need to find a word different from "forced"
What word would you recommend?
If I must do something then I am forced? no? -- and I'm not being facetious I'm genuinely curious.
If I wish to keep using production grade linux distributions (that my company has been using for 15+ years) then I must adopt systemd.
I guess I could convince my 25,000+ person organisation to change everything to a Debian based OS and subsequently move them to Debian, but that's not likely.
Why do you think that is? Why have production grade Linux distributions all chosen to adopt systemd?
With SysV init, how do you securely launch processes in cgroups, such that they'll consistently restart when the process happens to terminate, with stdout and stderr logged with consistent timestamps, with process dependency models that allow for faster boots due to parallelization?
(edit)
Journalctl is far better than `tail -f /var/log/starstar` and parsing all of those timestamps and inconsistently escaped logfile formats. There's no good way to modify everything in /etc/init.d in order to log to syslog-ng or rsyslog. Systemd and journalctl solve for that; for unified logging.
IMO, there's no question that systemd is the better way and I have zero nostalgia for spawning everything from a probably a shell specified in an /etc/init.d shebang without process restarting (and logging thereof), cgroups, and consistent logging.
> Why do you think that is? Why have production grade Linux distributions all chosen to adopt systemd?
Because RH funds a lot of software development, and Poettering works for them.
> Journalctl is far better than `tail -f /var/log/starstar`
Except when journald shits the bed and corrupts its own log file. Or when you want ship logs off-machine, yet journald does not support any standards-compliant transport so you end up have to log a second logging daemon (e.g., rsyslog)—in which case what's the damn point of the first? Or when you do a "service mysql start" and it dies, but there is no output anywhere of what went wrong, and you have to guess that you have a typo in your "my.cnf".
But other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
> ... in an /etc/init.d shebang without process restarting (and logging thereof), cgroups, and consistent logging.
The problem is not systemd-as-init-replacement. The problem is systemd-as-kitchen-sink. udevd is an "essential" part of systemd? Really? It can't be it's own stand-alone project? Really?
When journald logfile corruption occurs, it's detected and it starts writing a new logfile.
When flatfile logfile corruption occurs, it's not detected and there are multiple logfile formats to contend with. And multiple haphazard logrotate configs.
Here's how to use a separate process to ship journald logs - from one file handle - to a remote logging service: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/394822/how-should-i...
While there is a systemd-journal-remote, it's not necessary for journald to try and replicate what's already solved and tested in rsyslog and syslog-ng.
It's quite a bit more work to add every new service to the syslog-ng or rsyslog configuration than to just ship one journald log.
Furthermore, service start/stop events are already in the same stream (with the same timestamp format) with the services' stdout and stderr.
Why hasn't anyone written fsck for corrupted journald recovery?
...
I have not needed to makedev and chown and chatted and chcon anything in very many years. When you accidentally newbishly delete something from a static /dev and rebooting doesn't work and you have no idea what the major minor is or was, it sucks bad.
When you're trying to boot a system on a different machine but it doesn't work because the NIC is in a different bus, it's really annoying to have to symlink /dev or modify /etc. With udevd, all you need to do is define a rule to map the busid device name to e.g. eth0. I can remember encountering the devfs race condition resulting in eth0 and eth1 being mapped to different devices on different boots; which was dangerous because firewall rules are applied to device names.
Udev has been in the kernel since 2.6.
"What problems does udev actually solve?" https://superuser.com/questions/686774/what-problems-does-ud...
With integrated udev and systemd, I have no reason to run a separate hotplugd with a different config format (again with no cgroup support) and a different logstream.
Perhaps ironically, here's a link to the presentation PDF that was posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036020
And my comments there:
> What a good idea.
> Here's the hyperlinkified link to the {systemd-homed.service, systemd-userdbd.service, homectl, userdbctl} sources from the PDF: https://github.com/poettering/systemd/tree/homed
> Hadn't heard of varlink: https://varlink.org/
> Is there a FIPS-like subset of the most-widely-available LUKS configs? Otherwise home directories won't work on systems that have a limited set of LUKS modules.
Serverless: slower and more expensive
It'd be interesting to see how much this same workload would cost with e.g. OpenFaaS on k8s with autoscaling to zero; but there also you'd need to include maintenance costs like OS and FaaS stack upgrades. https://docs.openfaas.com/architecture/autoscaling/
Entropy can be used to understand systems
Maximum entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy
Here's a quote of a tweet about a (my own): comment on a schema:BlogPost: https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1048125281146421249:
> “When Bayes, Ockham, and Shannon come together to define machine learning” https://towardsdatascience.com/when-bayes-ockham-and-shannon...
> Comment: "How does this relate to the Principle of Maximum Entropy? How does Minimum Description Length relate to Kolmogorov Complexity?"
Thanks for sharing! Despite the fact that Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is so accessible, I find that most in our field (stats/ML) don't often think through information-theoretic tools in a "first principles way."
Yes, KL divergences show up everywhere, but they are not derived from scratch often enough. Maybe I'm stifled by my campus bubble though :)
New Query Language for Graph Databases to Become International Standard
Graph query languages are nice and all, but what about Linked Data here? Queries of schemaless graphs miss lots of data because without a schema this graph calls it "color" and that graph calls it "colour" and that graph calls it "色" or "カラー". (Of course this is also an issue even when there is a defined schema; but it's hardly possible to just happen to have comprehensible inter or even intra-organizational cohesion without e.g. RDFS and/or OWL and/or SHACL for describing (and changing) the shape of the data)
So, the task is then to compile schema-aware SPARQL to GQL or GraphQL or SQL or interminable recursive SQL queries or whatever it is.
For GraphQL, there's GraphQL-LD (which somewhat unfortunately contains a hashtag-indeterminate dash). I cite this in full here because it's very relevant to the GQL task at hand:
"GraphQL-LD: Linked Data Querying with GraphQL" (2018) https://comunica.github.io/Article-ISWC2018-Demo-GraphQlLD/
> GraphQL is a query language that has proven to be a popular among developers. In 2015, the GraphQL framework [3] was introduced by Facebook as an alternative way of querying data through interfaces. Since then, GraphQL has been gaining increasing attention among developers, partly due to its simplicity in usage, and its large collection of supporting tools. One major disadvantage of GraphQL compared to SPARQL is the fact that it has no notion of semantics, i.e., it requires an interface-specific schema. This therefore makes it difficult to combine GraphQL data that originates from different sources. This is then further complicated by the fact that GraphQL has no notion of global identifiers, which is possible in RDF through the use of URIs. Furthermore, GraphQL is however not as expressive as SPARQL, as GraphQL queries represent trees [4], and not full graphs as in SPARQL.
> In this work, we introduce GraphQL-LD, an approach for extending GraphQL queries with a JSON-LD context [5], so that they can be used to evaluate queries over RDF data. This results in a query language that is less expressive than SPARQL, but can still achieve many of the typical data retrieval tasks in applications. Our approach consists of an algorithm that translates GraphQL-LD queries to SPARQL algebra [6]. This allows such queries to be used as an alternative input to SPARQL engines, and thereby opens up the world of RDF data to the large amount of people that already know GraphQL. Furthermore, results can be translated into the GraphQL-prescribed shapes. The only additional requirement is their queries would now also need a JSON-LD context, which could be provided by external domain experts.
> In related work, HyperGraphQL [7] was introduced as a way to expose access to RDF sources through GraphQL queries and emit results as JSON-LD. The difference with our approach is that HyperGraphQL requires a service to be set up that acts as a intermediary between the GraphQL client and the RDF sources. Instead, our approach enables agents to directly query RDF sources by translating GraphQL queries client-side.
All of these RDFS vocabularies and OWL ontologies provide structure that minimizes the costs of merging and/or querying multiple datasets: https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/
All of these schema.org/Dataset s in the "Linked Open Data Cloud" are easier to query than a schemaless graph: https://lod-cloud.net/ . Though one can query schemaless graphs with SPARQL, as well.
For reference, RDFLib has a bunch of RDF graph implementations over various key/value and SQL store backends. RDFLib-sqlachemy does query parametrization correctly in order to minimize the risk of query injection. FOR THE RECORD, SQL Injection is the CWE Top 25 #1 most prevalent security weakness; which is something that any new spec and implementation should really consider before launching anything other than an e.g. overly-verbose JSON-based query language that people end up bolting a micro-DSL onto. https://github.com/RDFLib/rdflib-sqlalchemy
Most practically, I frequently want to read a graph of objects into RAM; update, extend, and interlink; and then transactionally save the delta back to the store. This requires a few things: (1) an efficient binary serialization protocol like Apache Arrow (SIMD), Parquet, or any of the BSON binary JSONs; (2) a transactional local store that can be manually synchronized with the remote store until it's consistent.
SPARQL Update was somewhat of an out-of-scope afterthought. Here's SPARQL 1.1 Update: https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-update/
Here's SOLID, which could be implemented with SPARQL on GQL, too; though all the re-serialization really shouldn't be necessary for EAV triples with a named graph URI identifier: https://solidproject.org/
5 star data: PDF -> XLS -> CSV -> RDF (GQL, AFAIU (but with no URIs(!?))) -> LOD https://5stardata.info/en/
Linked Data tends to live in a semantic web world that has a lot of open world assumptions. While there are a few systems like this out there, there aren't many. More practically focused systems collapse this worldview down into a much simpler model, and property graphs suit just fine.
There's nothing wrong with enabling linked data use cases, but you don't need RDF+SPARQL+OWL and the like to do that.
The "semantic web stack" I think has been shown by time and implementation experience to be an elegant set of standards and solutions for problems that very few real world systems want to tackle. In the intervening 2 full generations of tech development that have happened since a lot of those standards were born, some of the underlying stuff too (most particularly XML and XML-NS) went from indispensable to just plain irritating.
> Linked Data tends to live in a semantic web world that has a lot of open world assumptions. While there are a few systems like this out there, there aren't many. More practically focused systems collapse this worldview down into a much simpler model, and property graphs suit just fine.
Data integration is cost prohibitive. In n years time, the task is "Let's move all of these data silos into a data lake housed in our singular data warehouse; and then synchronize and also copy data around to efficiently query it in one form or another"
Linked data enables data integration from day one: enables the linking of tragically-silo'd records within disparate databases
There are very very many systems that share linked data. Some only label some of the properties with URIs in templates. Some enable federated online querying.
When you develop a schema for only one application implementation, you're tragically limiting the future value of the data.
> There's nothing wrong with enabling linked data use cases, but you don't need RDF+SPARQL+OWL and the like to do that.
Can you name a property graph use case that cannot be solved with RDFS and SPARQL?
> The "semantic web stack" I think has been shown by time and implementation experience to be an elegant set of standards and solutions for problems that very few real world systems want to tackle.
TBH, I think the problem is that people don't understand the value in linking our data silos through URIs; and so they don't take the time to learn RDFS or JSON-LD (which is pretty simple and useful for very important things like SEO: search engine result cards come from linked data embedded in HTML attributes (RDFa, Microdata) or JSON-LD)
The action buttons to 'RSVP', 'Track Package', anf 'View Issue' on Gmail emails are schema.org JSON-LD.
Applications can use linked data in any part of the stack: the database, the messages on the message queue, in the UI.
You might take a look at all of the use cases that SOLID solves for and realize how much unnecessary re-work has gone into indexing structs and forms validation. These are all the same app with UIs for interlinked subclasses of https://schema.org/Thing with unique inferred properties and aggregations thereof.
> In the intervening 2 full generations of tech development that have happened since a lot of those standards were born, some of the underlying stuff too (most particularly XML and XML-NS) went from indispensable to just plain irritating.
Without XSD, for example, we have no portable way to share complex fractions.
There's a compact representation of JSON-LD that minimizes record schema overhead (which gzip or lzma generally handle anyway)
https://lod-cloud.net is not a trivial or insignificant amount of linked data: there's real value in structuring property graphs with standard semantics.
Are our brains URI-labeled graphs? Nope, and we spend a ton of time talking to share data. Eventually, it's "well let's just get a spreadsheet and define some columns" for these property graph objects. And then, the other teams' spreadsheets have very similar columns with different labels and no portable datatypes (instead of URIs)
> Can you name a property graph use case that cannot be solved with RDFS and SPARQL?
No - that's not the point. Of course you can do it with RDFS + SPARQL. For that matter you could do it with redis. Fully beside the point.
What's important is what the more fluent and easy way to do things is. People vote with their feet, and property graphs are demonstrably easier to work with for most use cases.
“Easier” is completely subjective, no way you can demonstrate that.
RDF solves a much larger problem than just graph data model and query. It addresses data interchange on the web scale, using URIs, zero-cost merge, Linked Data etc.
> “Easier” is completely subjective, no way you can demonstrate that.
I agree it's subjective. While there's no exact measurement for this sort of thing, the proxy measure people usually use is adoption; and if you look into for example Cypher vs. SPARQL adoption, Neo4j vs. RDF store adoption, people are basically voting with their feet.
From my personal experiences developing software with both, I've found property graphs much simpler and a better map for how people think of data.
It's true that RDF tries to solve data interchange on the web scale. That's what it was designed for. But the original design vision, in my view, hasn't come to fruition. There are bits and pieces that have been adopted to great effect (things like RDF microformats for tagging HTML docs) but nothing like what the vision was.
What was the vision?
The RDFJS "Comparison of RDFJS libraries" wiki page lists a number of implementations; though none for React or AngularJS yet, unfortunately. https://www.w3.org/community/rdfjs/wiki/Comparison_of_RDFJS_...
There's extra work to build general purpose frameworks for Linked Data. It may have been hard for any firm with limited resources to justify doing it the harder way (for collective returns)
Dokieli (SOLID (LDP,), WebID, W3C Web Annotations,) is a pretty cool - if deceptively simple-looking - showcase of what's possible with Linked Data; it just needs some CSS and a revenue model to pay for moderation. https://dokie.li/
> property graphs are demonstrably easier to work with for most use cases.
How do you see property graphs as distinct from RDF?
People build terrible apps without schema or validation and leave others to clean that up.
> How do you see property graphs as distinct from RDF?
This is the full answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/30167732/2920686
I added an answer in context to the comments on the answer you've linked but didn't add a link from the comments to the answer. Here's that answer:
> (in reply to the comments on this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/30167732 )
> When an owl:inverseOf production rule is defined, the inverse property triple is inferred by the reasoner either when adding or updating the store, or when selecting from the store. This is a "materialized relation"
> Schema.org - an RDFS vocabulary - defines, for example, https://schema.org/isPartOf as the inverse property of hasPart. If both are specified, it's not necessary to run another graph pattern query to traverse a directed relation in the other direction. (:book1 schema:hasPart ?o), (?o schema:isPartOf :book1), (?s schema:hasPart :chapter2)
> It's certainly possible to use RDFS and OWL to describe schema for and within neo4j property graphs; but there's no reasoner to e.g. infer inverse properties or do schema validation.
> Is there any RDF graph that neo4j cannot store? RDF has datatypes and languages for objects: you'd need to reify properties where datatypes and/or languages are specified (and you'd be re-implementing well-defined semantics)
> Can every neo4j graph be represented with RDF? Yes.
> RDF is a representation for graphs for which there are very many store implementations that are optimized for various use cases like insert and query performance.
> Comparing neo4j to a particular triplestore (with reasoning support) might be a more useful comparison given that all neo4j graphs can be expressed as RDF.
And then, some time later, I realize that I want/need to: (3) apply production rules to do inference at INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE time or SELECT time (and indicate which properties were inferred (x is a :Shape and a :Square, so x is also a :Rectangle; x is a :Rectangle and :width and :height are defined, so x has an :area)); (4) run triggers (that execute code written in a different language) when data is inserted, updated, modified, or linked to; (5) asynchronously yield streaming results to message queue subscribers who were disconnected when the cached pages were updated
A Python Interpreter Written in Python
What an excellent 500 lines introduction to the byterun bytecode interpreter / virtual machine: https://github.com/nedbat/byterun
Also, proceeds from optional purchases of the AOSA books go to Amnesty International. https://aosabook.org/
Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
What a good idea.
Here's the hyperlinkified link to the {systemd-homed.service, systemd-userdbd.service, homectl, userdbctl} sources from the PDF: https://github.com/poettering/systemd/tree/homed
Hadn't heard of varlink: https://varlink.org/
Is there a FIPS-like subset of the most-widely-available LUKS configs? Otherwise home directories won't work on systems that have a limited set of LUKS modules.
Weld: Accelerating numpy, scikit and pandas as much as 100x with Rust and LLVM
There's also RustPython, a Rust implementation of CPython 3.5+: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20686580
> https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython
Is this basically what Cython and PyPy are trying to do, but with Rust?
PyPy is a JIT compiler. RustPython is an interpreter.
And Cython is an AOT compiler for a superset of Python.
RustPython seems to be modestly aiming for a reimplementation of CPython.
Maybe "dialect" would be more accurate than "superset"? I don't think Cython is technically a superset of Python, since I think runtime metaprogramming features like __dict__ and monkey-patching are significantly altered or restricted?
Cython is a reification of the interpretation of a python program. Ie it converts the python code into the equivalent CPython API calls (which are all in C) thereby allowing the developer to interperse real C code. Anything you could do in python you could technically do in Cython, although it would be much more verbose.
Yeah, I was going to make a similar comment. It's a dialect of CPython, and certainly there are extensions required to make it usable. But I'm not sure it is a strict superset of the full Python language.
Convention wound lean towards calling it RPython
Why?
Craftsmanship–The Alternative to the 4 Hour Work Week
> To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise. This assumes that for any given undertaking you either provide expertise or you are just a bystander. It’s the experts that are the drivers — an expertise that is gained from a curiosity, and a mindset of treating one’s craft very seriously.
Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies
USD$5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
"hey fossil fuels, let's 1v1" sincerely, solar
(From Forbes: United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education)
A few things:
1) That's not what was spent, it's what this paper projected was spent.
2) I think this paper is defining subsidy in a way that we don't usually use that word. They're calling the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change and pollution "subsidies", most people would just call those things "costs."
Using the word "subsidy" implies that governments are actively taking tax dollars and giving it to fossil fuel companies and consumers. That doesn't appear to be what's going on for the most part.
Look at Figure 4, the bulk of the so-called "subsidies" are "global warming" and "local pollution" those aren't what most people would call subsidies, they're costs.
I'm saying this just to clarify things, personally I am supportive of massive tax increases on carbon and massive subsidies for renewables.
It’s an unconventional way to use “subsidy,” but I think it fits.
Imagine a garbage company. The government pays them so they can buy land where they dump their garbage. Obviously a subsidy.
Now, let’s say the government buys the land themselves then gives it to the company for dumping. No money changes hands but this is still pretty clearly a subsidy.
Instead of giving the company land, the government retains ownership, but lets the company dump there for free. Still a pretty clear subsidy.
Instead of buying the land, the government just takes it. Now no money is involved at all, but it’s still a subsidy.
Instead of taking the land, the government just declares that it’s legal for the garbage company to dump trash on other people’s land, and the owners just have to deal with it. This is quite different in the details from the original subsidy, but the overall effect is essentially the same.
Polluters are in a situation that’s exactly like this last scenario. They get to dump their trash on everyone’s property and don’t have to pay for the privilege. They’re being subsidized in an amount equal to whatever payment it would take to get everyone to willingly accept this trash.
This is wrong because subsidies aren't just externalized costs. They are defined as monetary gifts. You're extending the definition by analogy and arguing that a company externalizing its costs is the same thing as a subsidy, but a subsidy implies direct and deliberate support.
This is important for a couple of reasons: The main one is that it's confusing to redefine subsidy when you can just say "cost" and have people understand you. People reading this survey might see the $5.2T number and assume that that cost is in addition to whatever the cost of climate change is and will have to read the paper to understand otherwise. This is unnecessarily confusing even if one were to grant the logic of it.
In addition, when people discuss subsidies, they are often most interested in government policy. The purpose of a subsidy often is to increase a certain kind of business, so we might worry about unnecessarily funding the fossil fuels and thus encouraging climate change in a manner above and beyond simply allowing them to be used the way we've always done, but that's not quite what's going on here.
One thing to keep in mind is that it's a lot easier to measure a genuine government subsidy than an externality. So the distinction matters in that regard as well. Any measure of the cost of climate change is to at least some degree speculation, whereas any attempt to measure the direct amount of money given to fossil fuel companies can probably be much more exact.
Gifts in kind aren’t subsidies? If the government gives equipment or resources or labor, rather than money, it’s no longer a subsidy? That sure doesn’t fit how I understand the term. What would you call those?
"Gifts in kind aren’t subsidies?"
They can be but that's less common. The key difference is that a subsidy is direct and an active policy.
For example, when people talk about subsidies for renewables, they aren't talking about any externalized costs of manufacture, which do exist, they are talking about direct government gifts and tax breaks deliberately put in place to encourage investment in renewables. When people talk about subsidies given to fossil fuels the same is true, especially when they are being compared to renewables as is the case in this discussion.
Edit: removed word "decision" to clarify my meaning
Then it's a gift in kind and a subsidy.
When I litter, I get fined, but those companies are not when they litter e.g. carbon all over. When I dump chemicals into nature, I get fined for polluting the environment or even imprisoned outright, those companies do not e.g. when it's in the form of "emissions". Cars in my country get taxed directly or indirectly (through fuel) based in part on emissions, while a lot of commercial vehicles and fuels for these vehikles get a reduced rate or even excluded from taxation. But cars here are taxed far less so than in other European countries. etc.
The governments are clearly aware that pollution and dumping your garbage are things you should not do or at least minimize. They made laws against it, but actively decided to exclude certain business sectors and/or certain types of pollution, or actively decided not to regulate or tax certain types of pollution while regulating/taxing others.
"Cars in my country get taxed directly or indirectly (through fuel) based in part on emissions"
Unless these emmission taxes are calibrated to the cost of climate change then this argument is missing the point. Taxes and subsidies are often instituted in response to negative and positive externalities, but that doesn't change the fact that they are different things. This is important when trying to draw policy comparisons which is our situation here.
You seem to want to argue that subsidizing a business and not taxing them on an externality is somehow morally the same thing, and that's an entirely different discussion, but it doesn't mean that they are factually the same thing. There is a practical difference in terms of how things are measured and how policies are compared across industries and governments and that difference matters.
>Unless these emmission taxes are calibrated to the cost of climate change then this argument is missing the point.
The stated policy goal in part is to reduce emissions to met climate targets to fight climate change, so yes.
>You seem to want to argue that subsidizing a business and not taxing them on an externality is somehow morally the same thing
It is.
>but it doesn't mean that they are factually the same thing.
First of all, the meaning of words and political concepts are never factual.
But I'd still argue that at a high level they are the same, and both are subsidies. In both cases the government refuses money it would otherwise collect from different parties, thereby gifting those entities value you can put a price tag on.
Those decisions are active decisions NOT to do something (while doing something about the same thing or very similar things when it comes to other parts of the population), at least at this point.
The only distinction I'd make is between direct subsidies (the government forks over money) and indirect/implicit subsidies (the government decides not to make certain entities pay for certain things for which other entities have to pay the government).
">but it doesn't mean that they are factually the same thing.
First of all, the meaning of words and political concepts are never factual."
You're still missing the point. The point is that there is a distinction between a subsidy and an externality and that distinction is important. It's important for measurement reasons (The exact monetary amount a government spends on something is easier to measure than the indirect cost of a policy,) and for simple communication reasons. It makes no sense to talk about instituting a tax to cover a subsidy. You institute a tax to cover an externality. It also matters because there are ways of dealing with externalities other than taxes and subsidies and reducing the language makes this more confusing. It's especially confusing when the distinction is made in one discussion (about renewables) but not in the other (about fossil fuels.)
There is a term for using an unexpected definition for a word that already has a widely used definition during a discussion, that is a 'stipulative definition'. It's dishonest to do so without being clear upfront or in response to a discussion where the original definition is in use. This results in equivocation. Whether or not a subsidy is morally equivalent to an externality is a moot point if you're willing toss about with the language. My work involves financial reporting and if my employer asked for one set of numbers and I gave him another that I argued were 'morally equivalent' would pretty clearly be in the wrong, even if the point I was making about moral equivalence was correct.
No, you're splitting hairs.
There are direct and indirect subsidies. Indirect subsidies include externalities: external costs paid by everyone else (that the government should be incentivizing reductions in by requiring the folks causing them to pay)
Semantic digressions aside, they're earning while everyone else pays costs resultant from their operations (and from our apparent inability to allocate with e.g. long term security, health, and prosperity as primary objectives for the public sphere)
Handing money to polluters helps polluters, and failing to disincentivize externalities also helps polluters, but it's OK to call one thing a subsidy and the other thing poor governance.
"Subsidy" carries a connotation of purposeful action to help something. Subsidizing a bad thing is worse than merely allowing it to happen or looking the other way. It seems like you want to re-label things in "B" by the label for "A" to make it sound worse.
>"Subsidy" carries a connotation of purposeful action to help something.
Purpouseful action implies awareness and intention.
Externality implies not yet recognized.
Having 2 words for similar concepts does not mean they are different concepts. "heavy" and "massive" are two different words but they convey essentially the same thing.
I would agree that unrecognized externalities are not subsidies, say CO2 pollution before it was recognized, but then again since they were literally not recognized as externalities (yet).
But the very moment CO2 pollution is recognized, the previously unrecognized externality is to be instantly viewed as a subsidy.
History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, from then on as a farce.
[deleted]
Why do subsidies have to be an active policy decision?
You’re right, when people talk about fossil fuel subsidies, that’s thinking of government gifts and tax breaks. My point is that this is a deeply inadequate way to think about it. If you only look at these, and compare fossil fuels to renewables, you’ll come away thinking that fossil fuels are far cheaper than they actually are.
"If you only look at these, and compare fossil fuels to renewables, you’ll come away thinking that fossil fuels are far cheaper than they actually are."
In the case of this discussion, you're looking at it backwards. The subject of fossil fuel subsidies was brought up in comparison to subsidies for renewables which in this case were already defined as specific government programs. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't be being such a stickler. However given that we are comparing renewables to fossil fuels we need to be sure that we are measuring the same thing and to include externalities when measuring fossil fuels and not when measuring renewables is to be not measuring the same thing. (I actually got confused when I first saw the IMF link so I know my concern isn't hypothetical.)
Yes, I get that the case can be made that cost of using fossil fuels is more that the sum of direct gifts by the government to fossil fuel companies (fucking duh!) but that can be expressed without implying that governments gave $5.2T in tax dollars directly to fossil fuel companies in 2017. Where confusion is possible, it's best to make distinctions and clarify what is meant.
"subsidies" includes both direct and indirect subsidies.
We can measure direct subsidies by measuring real and effective tax rates.
We can measure indirect subsidies like healthcare costs paid by Medicare with subjective valuations of human life and rough estimates of the value of a person's health and contribution to growth in GDP, and future economic security.
But who has the time for this when we're busy paying to help folks who require disaster relief services from the government and NGOs (neither of which are preventing further escalations in costs)
Problem is that if the word "subsidies" is used exclusively to mean a specific and narrow concept around cash transfers when talking about renewables, but then you use the term to include a much broader set of scenarios when talking about fossil fuels, while directly comparing the derived numbers, then you're misusing the language in order to deceive, regardless of all else. You're communicating that the numbers represent the same calculations for both forms of energy, when you know that they actually don't.
Define the terms however you like, as long as you are careful to not to induce people to believe someone that is untrue.
Show HN: Python Tests That Write Themselves
This actually gave me another idea. What do you all think, I’d be up for trying to build it.
It would watch your program during execution and record each function calls input and output. And then create tests for each function using those inputs and outputs.
You could always go over the created tests manually and fix them or review them but if nothing else it could be a good start.
Instagram created 'MonkeyType' to do something similar for type annotations.
A lower barrier way of trying this out could be to run MonkeyType in combination with OP's hypothesis-auto (which uses type annotations to generate the tests).
pytype (Google) [1], PyAnnotate (Dropbox) [2], and MonkeyType (Instagram) [3] all do dynamic / runtime PEP-484 type annotation type inference [4]
[1] https://github.com/google/pytype
[2] https://github.com/dropbox/pyannotate
Most Americans see catastrophic weather events worsening
The stratifications on this are troubling.
> But there are wide differences in assessments by partisanship. Nine in 10 Democrats think weather disasters are more extreme, compared with about half of Republicans.
It's not a partisan issue: we all pay these costs.
> Majorities of adults across demographic groups think weather disasters are getting more severe, according to the poll. College-educated Americans are slightly more likely than those without a degree to say so, 79 percent versus 69 percent.
Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
> Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
Source? What definitions are being used for severity? How is the sample of events selected? Is there a statistically-significant effect or might it be random variation?
> Source? What definitions are being used for severity? How is the sample of events selected? Is there a statistically-significant effect or might it be random variation?
These are great questions that any good skeptic / data scientist should always be asking. Here are some summary opinions based upon meta analyses with varyingly stringent inclusion criteria.
( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368 )
"Scientific consensus on climate change" lists concurring, non-commital, and opposing groups of persons with and without conflicting interests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...
USGCRP, "2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I" [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6.
"Chapter 8: Droughts, Floods, and Wildfire" https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/8/
"Chapter 9: Extreme Storms" https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/
"Appendix A: Observational Datasets Used in Climate Studies" https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/appendix-a/
The key findings in this report do list supporting evidence and degrees of confidence in predictions about the frequency and severity of severe weather events.
I'll now proceed to support the challenged claim that disaster severity and frequency are increasing by citing disaster relief cost charts which do not directly support the claim. Unlike your typical televised debate or congressional session, I have: visual aids, a computer, linked to the sources I've referenced. Finding the datasets ( https://schema.org/Dataset ) for these charts may be something that someone has time for while the costs to taxpayers and insurance holders are certainly increasing for a number of reasons.
"Taxpayer spending on U.S. disaster fund explodes amid climate change, population trends" (2019) has a nice chart displaying "Disaster-relief appropriations, 10-year rolling median" https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/04/22/taxpayer...
"2018's Billion Dollar Disasters in Context" includes a chart from NOAA: "Billion-Dollar Disaster Event Types by Year (CPI-Adjusted)" with the title embedded in the image text - which I searched for - and eventually found the source of: [1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2018...
[1] "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series
Thank you!
It seems these data are mostly counted in dollars of damage or dollars of relief, which is a proxy for the severity.
Would it be correct to say there is still some question about whether dollars are a good measure of severity?
EDIT: As I am browsing the data, it's hard to disentangle actual weather events from things like lava, fires, unsound building decisions, and just the politics of money moving around.
> It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
From the article, storms may be getting slightly more severe - but "more frequent" is incorrect:
> Scientific studies indicate a warming world has slightly stronger hurricanes, but they don’t show an increase in the number storms hitting land, Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said. He said the real climate change effect causing more damage is storm surge from rising seas, wetter storms dumping more rain and more people living in vulnerable areas.
Now, we all should do what we can to address it - but we all should also examine whether we're picking and choosing only scientific observations that support our feelings/pre-conceived notions while discarding the rest of the data.
The article seems to have focused on perceptions of persons who aren't concerned with taking an evidence-based look (at various types of storms: floods, cyclones (i.e. hurricanes), severe thunderstorms, windstorms. Regardless, costs are increasing. I've listed a few sources here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925127
"2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I" > "Chapter 9: Extreme Storms" lists a number of relevant Key Findings with supporting evidence (citations) and degrees of confidence: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/
> we all pay these costs
... if there actually are costs to pay. You seem to be sidestepping the actual question here.
"Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series
> The stratifications on this are troubling.
They are, yet almost no one I know of (in leadership positions, or the general public) seems to think they're troubling enough to put any serious effort into determining with some level of certainty why there is so much stratification along political lines on so many important issues, this being only one of them. "Conservatives are uneducated" sounds about right so that's what we'll go with it seems, regardless of whether it's actually correct. That belief may be right, but it may not.
> It's not a partisan issue: we all pay these costs.
In one perspective, but as is usually the case, there are several perspectives involved. Another non-trivial perspective is that the solution requires non-partisan cooperation, and from that perspective partisanship is not only an issue, it is a crucially important issue, so we might be well served by putting some effort into understanding the true nature of it.
> Weather disasters are getting more severe. It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
For certain definitions of "more", "severe", "objectively", "true", and "frequent".
So if the problem isn't simply that "conservatives are uneducated", what else might it be? I think the answer lies in the incredibly complex manner in which people perceive the world in general, what information they consume, how they perceive that information, and how they integrate it into their personal internal overall worldview. People think they think in facts, but they actually think in stories, and in turn this affects how they consume new information.
Take this simple article as an example, and notice the variety of perspectives we see already with just a few (14 at the time of my writing) comments posted in this thread. Notice how people aren't discussing just the content of the article, but rather including related ideas from past information they have consumed and stored (the mechanics of which we do not understand) within the mental model of the world they hold in their brain. An even better example of this behavior can be seen in the recent discussion on the CDC report on vaping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20915520 Observe all the complex perspectives based on the very same "facts" in the article. Observe all the assertions of related "facts", that are actually only opinions. Observe all the mind reading.
If you start looking for this phenomenon you will notice it everywhere, and if you pay closer attention you may also notice that certain topics are particularly prone to devolving into narrative (rather than fact) based conversation. The usual suspects are obvious: religion, gender, sexuality, etc, but smoking/vaping seems to me like somewhat of an interesting outlier. The former examples are very closely tied to personal identity, but while smoking/vaping shares an identity attribute to some degree, I feel like there's some other unseen psychological issue in play that results in such high polarization of beliefs.
My guess is you and I see very different things despite consuming the very same article. I lean conservative/libertarian (generally speaking), and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.
In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article, and post commentary on ~why/how you believe you feel you consider that important on a psychological level. Psychological self-analysis is famously difficult, but even with moderate success I suspect some very interesting things would rise to the surface.
> My guess is you and I see very different things despite consuming the very same article. I lean conservative/libertarian (generally speaking),
HN specifically avoids politics. In context to the in-scope article, when you say "conservative/libertarian" do you mean: fiscally conservative (haven't seen a deficit hawk in decades other than "Read my lips. No new taxes" followed by responsibly raising taxes), socially libertarian (Liberty as a fundamental right; if you're not violating the rights of others the government is not obligated or even granted the right to intervene at all), or conservative as in imposing your particular traditional standard of moral values which you believe are particular to a particular side of the aisle?
Or, do you mean that you're libertarian in regards to the need and the right to regulate business and industry in the interest of consumers ("laissez faire")? I'm certainly not the only person to observe that lack of regulation results in smog-filled cities due to un-costed 'externalities' in a blind pursuit of optimization for short-term profit.
At issue here, I think, is whether we think we can avert future escalations of costs by banding together to address climate change now; and how best to achieve the Paris Agreement targets that we set for ourselves (despite partisan denial, delusion, and indifference to increasing YoY costs [1]) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
I'm personally and financially far more concerned about the long-term costs of climate change than a limited number of special interests who can very easily diversify and/or divest to take advantage of the exact same opportunities.
> and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.
While governments (and militaries (TODO)) do contribute substantially to emissions and resultant climate change, I think it unnecessary to qualify that unregulated decisions by industry should be the primary focus here. Industry has done far more to cause climate change than governments (which can more efficiently provide certain services useful to all citizens)
> In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article,
These people aren't doing jack about the problem because they haven't reviewed this chart: "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series
Maybe they want insurance payouts, which result in higher premiums. Maybe the people who built in those locations should be paying the costs.
> and post commentary on ~why/how you believe you feel you consider that important on a psychological level. Psychological self-analysis is famously difficult, but even with moderate success I suspect some very interesting things would rise to the surface.*
They don't even care because they refuse to accept that it's a problem.
The article was ineffectual at addressing the very real problem.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925127 :
> ( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368 )
In this observational study of perceptions, college education was less predictive than party affiliation.
Maybe reframing this as a short-term money problem [1] would result in compassion for people who are suffering billions of dollars of loss every year.
> HN specifically avoids politics.
I'm not saying this to be argumentative, but I suspect that is once again merely your perception. HN avoids (dang aggressively shuts down, to the detriment of the world imho, because if smart people can't find a way to discuss these things objectively, how do we expect the average person on the street to) political discussions that have a caustic odor, but there's plenty of political shit talking on HN.
> "conservative/libertarian" do you mean: fiscally conservative
Yes, but the real kind, not the phonies we've had for decades.
> socially libertarian (Liberty as a fundamental right; if you're not violating the rights of others the government is not obligated or even granted the right to intervene at all)
Yes.
> or conservative as in imposing your particular traditional standard of moral values which you believe are particular to a particular side of the aisle
To a degree, but here I think you're dealing with an interpretation of reality more than reality itself (not meant as an insult; it's how humans are). But yes, somewhat, and this is a whole other interesting and important conversation, that I think society should be having in a more serious / less polarized way.
> Or, do you mean that you're libertarian in regards to the need and the right to regulate business and industry in the interest of consumers ("laissez faire")?
I used to be very laissez faire, but in many specific areas I am now the exact opposite - if I was in charge, corporations would be in for a very rude awakening. But laissez faire is my default stance until facts suggest it is excessively harmful to the greater good.
> At issue here, I think, is whether we think we can avert future escalations of costs by banding together to address climate change now
100% agree. But if we willfully ignore the realities of human nature/psychology, I predict we'll never be able to even remotely band together, especially in the hyper-weaponized-meme world we now find ourselves in. Averting future escalations is the larger goal, but it is completely dependent upon cooperation, which is dependent on communication & perception. I believe perception is where we are failing most.
> I'm personally and financially far more concerned about the long-term costs of climate change than a limited number of special interests who can very easily diversify and/or divest to take advantage of the exact same opportunities.
Me too.
>> and I am deeply distrustful of government (for extremely good reasons I believe), so I know for a fact that my interpretation of the article is going to be heavily distorted by that. Any logical inconsistency, ambiguousness, disingenuousness, technical dishonesty, or anything else along those lines is going to get red flagged in my mind, whereas others will read it in a much more forgiving fashion. And in an article on a different political hot topic, we will switch our behaviors.
> While governments (and militaries (TODO)) do contribute substantially to emissions and resultant climate change, I think it unnecessary to qualify that unregulated decisions by industry should be the primary focus here. Industry has done far more to cause climate change than governments (which can more efficiently provide certain services useful to all citizens)
I think you misunderstood. Here I'm not talking about government/military damage to the environment (although that's a very big deal, the hypocrisy of which reinforces my distrust even more), I'm saying that I don't trust what they're up to at all. With a few exceptions (Bernie Sanders, etc), I am very distrustful of the true honesty and sincerity of all politicians regardless of affiliation. I suppose this is less that they're fundamentally dishonest, but rather the nature of our system is such that you have to be dishonest.
>> In such threads, I think it would be extremely interesting for people with opposing views to post excerpts of the parts that "catch your attention", with an explanation of why. This is kind of what happens anyway, but I'm thinking with a completely different motive: rather than quoting excerpts with commentary to argue your ~political side of the issue with the goal of "winning the argument", take an unemotional, more abstract view of your personal cognitive processing of the article,
> These people aren't doing jack about the problem because they haven't reviewed this chart: "Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series" (1980-2019) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/time-series Maybe they want insurance payouts, which result in higher premiums. Maybe the people who built in those locations should be paying the costs.
I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood. I was referring to a meta discussion, on human psychology and the nature of perception - the distinctly different way in which you and I consume, perceive, store, integrate, and recall the information in an article, not the information itself. I believe this is where the solution to these problems is hiding.
> They don't even care because they refuse to accept that it's a problem.
Here you are acting as if you are able to read the minds of other people. Intuition, which is kind of a dimensional compression of perceived reality, has evolved in humans because it is extremely useful. However, when dealing with high complexity, it can be dangerous.
> ( I had hoped that the other top-level post I posted here would develop into a discussion, but these excerpts seem to have bubbled up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20919368 )
Oh, you're not wrong on those facts I'm sure, but people don't think in facts. They think they do, but they don't actually. If we want to do something about these and other problems, you have to look for the invisible blockages, and some of them are within you and I, despite the sincerity of our intentions.
Unfortunately, even genuinely smart people (like much of the HN crowd) seem to be extremely resistant to even considering this notion. I suspect the problem is that although a person may be highly educated, at the subconscious level they are still highly tribal. But I believe if we can get people to start to realize these things, to see the world in this abstract form, then much of the rest might fall into place far easier than the current apparent polarization of beliefs would suggest.
> It is objectively, quantitatively true that weather disasters are getting more frequent and more severe.
There is no data to support such an assertion. It's confirmation bias stemming from the belief that climate change will lead to such an effect.
> "2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I" > "Chapter 9: Extreme Storms" lists a number of relevant Key Findings with supporting evidence (citations) and degrees of confidence: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/
How about a link to a chart indicating frequency and severity of severe weather events?
The Paris Agreement is predicated upon the link between human actions, climate change, and severe weather events. 195 countries have signed the Paris Agreement with consensus that what we're doing is causing climate change.
Here are some climate-relevant poll questions:
Do you think the costs of disaster relief will continue to increase due to frequency and severity of severe weather events?
Does it make sense to spend more on avoiding further climate change now rather than even more on disaster relief later?
How can you help climate refugees? Do you donate to DoD and National Guards? Do you donate to NGOs? How can we get better at handling more frequent and more severe disasters?
Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction
Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1
Where Dollar Bills Come From
Monetary Policy Is the Root Cause of the Millennials’ Struggle
Volatility works out for people who save (who park capital in liquid assets that aren't doing work in order to have wheat for the eventual famine). These guys. They save, short like heck when the market is falling, and swoop in to save the day. What a great time to be selling 0% loans.
Personal Savings Rate (PSR) stratified by greatest generation and not greatest generation is also relevant. Are relatively fixed living expenses higher now? Yes. Is my generation just blowing what they could invest into interest-bearing investments on unnecessary stuff from Amazon? Yes. And expensive meals and drinks.
How have corporate profits and wages changed?
In their day, you put you gosh-danged money aside. For later. So that you have money later.
And that is why you should buy my book, entitled: "Invest in things with long term returns: don't buy shtuff you don't f need, save for tomorrow; and other financial advice"
Which brings me to: the cost of college textbooks and a college education in terms of average hourly wages.
By the way, over the longer term, index funds are likely to outperform funds. Gold may be likely to outperform the stock market. And, over the recent term -- this is for all you suckers out there -- cryptocurrencies have outperformed all stock and commodities markets. How much total wealth is being created on an annual basis here?
Payday loans have something like 300% APY.
How does 2% inflation affect trade when other central banking cabals haven't chosen the same target? "Devaluation"! "Treachery"!
Non-root containers, Kubernetes CVE-2019-11245 and why you should care
> At the same time, all the current implementations of rootless containers rely on user namespaces at their core. Not to be confused with what is referred to as non-root containers in this article, rootless containers are containers that can be run and managed by unprivileged users on the host. While Docker and other runtimes require a daemon running as root, rootless containers can be run by any user without additional capabilities.
non-root / rootless
How do black holes destroy information and why is that a problem?
man, watch the PBS YouTube channel SpaceTime. They're short, informative, and very well done. they dedicate a handful of episodes to getting you ready for Hawking radiation.
"Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed" re: determinism and T-Symmetry ("time-reversal symmetry") by PBS SpaceTime https://youtu.be/HF-9Dy6iB_4
Classical information is 'collapsed' quantum information, so that would mean that classical information is never lost either.
There appear to be multiple solutions for Navier-Stokes; i.e. somewhat chaotic.
If white holes are on the other side of black holes, Hawking radiation would not account for the entirety of the collected energy/information. Is our visible universe within a white hole? Is everything that's ever been embedded in the sidewall of a black hole shredder?
Maybe even recordings of dinosaurs walking; or is that lemurs walking in reverse?
Do 1/n, 1/∞, and n/∞ approach a symbolic limit where scalars should not be discarded; with piecewise operators?
Banned C standard library functions in Git source code
FWIW, here's awesome-static-analysis > Programming Languages > C/C++: https://github.com/mre/awesome-static-analysis/blob/master/R...
These tools have lists of functions not to use. Most of them — at least the security-focused ones — likely also include: strcpy, strcat, strncpy, strncat, sprints, and vsprintf just like banned.h
Ask HN: What's the hardest thing to secure in a web-app?
"OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks" https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...
> A1:2017-Injection, A2:2017-Broken Authentication, A3:2017-Sensitive Data Exposure, A4:2017-XML External Entities (XXE), A5:2017-Broken Access Control, A6:2017-Security Misconfiguration, A7:2017-Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), A8:2017-Insecure Deserialization, A9:2017-Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities, A10:2017-Insufficient Logging&Monitoring
"OWASP Top 10 compared to SANS CWE 25" https://www.templarbit.com/blog/2018/02/08/owasp-top-10-vs-s...
Crystal growers who sparked a revolution in graphene electronics
> This seven-metre-tall machine can squeeze carbon into diamonds
OT but, is this a thing now? Diamonds can be entangled.
Don't know what you mean by entangled. They mention forming diamonds using the heat and pressure of the press, which is a well known technique to alter the crystal lattice between carbon atoms.
Does it take more energy than mining for diamonds?
> Quantum Entanglement Links 2 Diamonds: Usually a finicky phenomenon limited to tiny, ultracold objects, entanglement has now been achieved for macroscopic diamonds at room temperature (2011) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/room-temperature-...
It takes less human suffering.
Things to Know About GNU Readline
I map <up> to history-search-backward in my .inputrc; so I can type 'sudo ' and press <up> to cycle through everything starting with sudo:
# <up> -- history search backward (match current input)
"\e[A": history-search-backward
# <down> -- history search forward (match current input)
"\e[B": history-search-forward
I do the exact same thing. This will probably be considered sacrilege by some but I also remap tab completion to cycle through all matches instead of stopping at the first ambiguous character:
# Set up tab and Shift-tab to cycle through completion options
"\e[Z": "\e-1\t"
TAB: menu-complete
# Alt-S is normal style TAB complete
"\es": complete
> I also remap tab completion to cycle through all matches instead of stopping at the first ambiguous character
Windows PowerShell does this and I love it. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t want this
Because instead of helping me enter a long filename by its distinctive parts, it forces flat mental read-decide-skip loop based on first few letters, which is slow and cannot be narrowed down without typing out additional letters by hand. It is like selecting from a popup menu through a 1-line window.
If it presented a real popup for file selection, combining both worlds (tab to longest match, untab to undo, up-down to navigate), that would be great. But it doesn’t.
> which is slow and cannot be narrowed down without typing out additional letters by hand.
In a PowerShell environment specifically, you usually end up having to backspace a dozen or more characters completed from a long command name before you can resume narrowing the search. It's less of a problem on a Unix shell where commands tend to be short.
Interestingly, that's one of the things I hate about powershell (and dos)
zsh works like that too.
I did this a lot, too, until I started using fzf and mapped <Control-r> to fuzzy history search. It is really useful, you might like it!
I came here to post exactly this! Very useful.
Two more quick tips
1. Undo is ^_ (ctrl+shift+-)
2. To learn more tricks...
bindkey -p> Undo is ^_ (ctrl+shift+-)
I use ctrl-/. I don't recall whether it's a default binding or not, but at least you don't have to press the shift key :-)
Both are valid undo bindings in emacs so this is probably the reason that they are both supported. (I think this is an arrogant of a time where the keys were indistinguishable (and I think maybe they still are mostly indistinguishable to terminal apps))
Is this macro from the article dangerous because it doesn't quote the argument?
Control-j: "\C-a$(\C-e)"
The macro means:
\C-a: beginning of line
$: self-insert
(: self-insert
\C-e: end of line
): self-insert
grep 'blah blah' |some_file
$(grep 'blah blah' some_file)|
Show HN: Termpage – Build a webpage that behaves like a terminal
This looks useful.
FWIW, you can build a curses-style terminal GUI with Urwid (in Python) and use that through the web. AFAIU, it requires Apache; but it's built on Tornado (which is now built on Asyncio) so something more lightweight than Apache on a Pi should definitely be doable. Termpage with like a Go or Rust REST API may still be more lightweight, but more work.
Vimer - Avoid multiple instances of GVim with gvim –remote[-tab]-silent wrapper
I have a shell script I named 'e' (for edit) that does basically this. If VIRTUAL_ENV_NAME is set (by virtualenvwrapper), e opens a new tab in that gui vim remote if gvim or macvim are on PATH, or just in a console vim if not. https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/e
'editwrd'/'ewrd'/'ew' does tab-completion relative to whatever $_WRD (working directory) is set to (e.g. by venv) and calls 'e' with that full path: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/_...
It's unfortunately not platform portable like vimer, though.
Electric Dump Truck Produces More Energy Than It Uses
Ask HN: Let's make an open source/free SaaS platform to tackle school forms
I have 4 kids. I am filling out all the start of school forms for each kid. I have to fill out these same forms each year. Are you doing the same thing? Let's make this year the last year we are manually filling out forms -- let's build a SaaS platform for school forms. Community built, open-sourced, free.
Brief sketch of the idea: survey monkey + docusign, but with a 100 pre-built templates for K-12 school situations. Medical emergency form. Carpool form. Field trip permission form. Backend gives schools an easy way to customize and track forms. Forms are emailed to parents and filled out online. Parent's information is saved so that any new form is pre-filled in with as much known info as possible.
Anyone feeling the same pain? Anyone want to join with me and do it?
Technically, a checkbox may qualify as a digital signature; however, identification / authentication and storage integrity are fairly challengeable (just as a written signature on a piece of paper with a date written on it is challengeable)
Given that notarization is not required for parental consent forms, I'm not sure what sort of server security expense is justified or feasible.
How much does processing all of the paper forms cost each school? Per-student?
In terms of storing digital record of authorization, a private set of per-student OpenBadges with each OpenBadge issued by the school would be easy enough. W3C Verified Claims (and Linked Data Signatures) are the latest standards for this sort of thing.
We could evaluate our current standards for chain of custody in regards to the level of trust we place in commercial e-signature platforms.
The school could send home a sheet with a QR code and a shorturl, but that would be more expensive than running hundreds of copies of the same sheet of paper.
The school could require a parent or guardian's email address for each student in the SIS Student Information System and email unique links to prefilled forms requesting authorization(s).
Just as with e-Voting, assuring that the person who checks a checkbox or tries to scribble their signature with a mouse or touchscreen is the authorized individual may be more difficult than verifying that a given written signature is that of the parent or guardian authorized to authorize.
AFAIU, Google Forms for School can include the logged-in user's username; but parents don't have school domain accounts with Google Apps for Education or Google Classroom.
How would the solution integrate with schools' existing SIS (Student Information Systems)? Upload a CSV of (student, {student info}, {guardian email (s)})? This is private information that deserves security, which costs money.
Which users can log-in for the school and/or district to check the state of the permission / authorization requests and PII personally-identifiable information.
While cryptographic signatures may be overkill as a substitute for permission slips, FWIW, a timestamp within a cryptographically-signed document only indicates what the local clock was set to at the time. Blockchains have relatively indisputable timestamps ("certainly no later than the time that the tx made it into a block"), but blockchains don't solve for proving the key-person relation at a given point in time.
And also, my parent or guardian said you can take me on field trips if you want. https://backpack.openbadges.org/
Ask HN: Is there a CRUD front end for databases (especially SQLite)?
I'm currently looking for a program (a simple executable) that "opens" an SQLite database and (via introspection of the schema) without any further configuration allows simple CRUD operations on the database.
Yes, there is DB Browser and a gazillion other database administration frontends, but it should really be limited to CRUD operations. No changing the table, the schema, the indexes. Simple UI.
For users that have no idea about SQL or databases.
Is there anything like that already done and ready to use?
There are lots of apps that do database introspection. Some also generate forms on the fly, but eventually it's necessary to: specify a forms widget for a particular field because SQL schema only describes the data and not the UI; and specify security authorization restrictions on who can create, read, update, or delete data.
And then you want to write arbitrary queries to filter on columns that aren't indexed; but it's really dangerous to allow clients to run arbitrary SQL queries because there basically are no row/object-level database permissions (the application must enforce row-level permissions).
Datasette is a great tool for read-only database introspection and queries of SQLite databases. https://github.com/simonw/datasette
Sandman2 generates a REST API for an arbitrary database. https://github.com/jeffknupp/sandman2
You can generate Django models and then write admin.py files for each model/table that you want to expose in the django.contrib.admin interface.
There are a number of apps for providing a GraphQL API given introspection of a database that occurs at every startup or at runtime; but that doesn't solve for row-level permissions (or web forms)
If you have an OpenAPI spec for the REST API that runs atop The database, you can generate forms ("scaffolding") from the OpenAPI spec and then customize those with form widgets; optionally with something like json-schema.
It's not safe to allow introspected CRUD like e.g. phpMyAdmin for anything but development. If there are no e.g. foreign-key constraints specified in the SQL schema,a blindly-introspected UI very easily results in database corruption due to invalid foreign key references (because the SQL schema doesn't specify what table.column a foreign key references).
Django models, for example, unify SQL schema and forms UI in models.py; admin.py is optional but really useful for scaffolding (such as when you're doing manual testing because you haven't yet written automated tests) https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/ref/contrib/admin/#mod...
California approves solar-powered EV charging network and electric school buses
> The press release from the company said, “heavy-duty vehicles produce more particulate matter than all of the state’s power plants combined”.
> […] for instance why only “10 school buses”?
IARC has recognized diesel exhaust as carcinogenic (lung cancer) since 2012.
Are there other electric school bus programs in the US?
(edit)
https://www.trucks.com/2019/03/22/can-electric-school-buses-...
> Most school systems don’t have sufficient capital to finance the high initial costs of electric bus purchases and charging infrastructure development, he said.
> In the U.S., the school bus market is about 33,000 to 35,000 vehicles per year – about six times more than transit buses.
You May Be Better Off Picking Stocks at Random, Study Finds
How is this not the same conclusion as other studies that find that index funds out perform others?
In addition to diversification that reduces risk of overexposure to down sectors or typically over-performing assets, index funds have survivorship bias: underperforming assets are replaced by assets that meet the fund's criteria.
Yes its sad that every one jumps on index funds which can be a good idea but its not the right choice 100% of the time.
Root: CERN's scientific data analysis framework for C++
Root has some features that are very unique and powerful.
It’s used in particle physics today mostly because it allows to do performant out-of-memory, on-disk Data Processing.
With frameworks like Python pandas, you always end up having to manually partition your data if it doesn’t fit in memory. And of course, it’s C++, so by default the data analysis code is pretty performant. This makes a difference when you can iterate your analysis in one hour instead of 20.
That being said, when I last worked with it, Root was a scrambled mess with terrible interfaces and way to many fringe features, e.g. around plotting, that are better handled by Python nowadays. It even has a C++ command line!!!
I wrote a blog post back then how I thought it could be fixed: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2016/06/18/root8-what-roo...
> With frameworks like Python pandas, you always end up having to manually partition your data if it doesn’t fit in memory.
"Pandas Docs > Pandas Ecosystem > Out of Core" lists a number of solutions for working with datasets that don't fit into RAM: Blaze, Dask, Dask-ML (dask-distributed; Scikit-Learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow), Koalas, Odo, Ray, Vaex https://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/ecosystem.h...
The dask API is very similar to the pandas API.
Are there any plans for ROOT to gain support for Apache Parquet, and/or Apache Arrow zero-copy reads and SIMD support, and/or https://RAPIDS.ai (Arrow, numba, Dask, pandas, scikit-learn, XGboost, spark, CUDA-X GPU acceleration, HPC)? https://arrow.apache.org/
https://root.cern.ch/root-has-its-jupyter-kernel (2015)
> Yet another milestone of the integration plan of ROOT with the Jupyter technology has been reached: ROOT now offers a Jupyter kernel! You can try it already now.
> ROOT is the 54th entry in this list and this is pretty cool. Now not only the PyROOT, the ROOT Python bindings, are integrated with notebooks but it's also possible to express your data mining in C++ within a notebook, taking advantage of all the powerful features of ROOT - plotting (now also interactive thanks to (Javascript ROOT](https://root.cern.ch/js/)), multivariate analysis, linear algebra, I/O and reflection: all available within a notebook.
Does this work with JupyterLab now? (edit) Here's the JupyterLab extension developer guide: https://jupyterlab.readthedocs.io/en/stable/developer/extens... (edit) here's the gh issue: https://github.com/root-project/jsroot/issues/166
...
ROOT is now installable with conda: `conda install -c conda-forge root metakernel jupyterlab # notebook`
For c/c++ in Jupyter, see xeus-cling https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus-cling
Coincidentally, cling (wrapped by xeus-cling) is also a product from CERN.
Many of the CERN researchers are pretty deep into C++.
It was there that I got my template meta-programming baptism, back in 2002, when gcc was still trying to cope with template heavy code.
And curiously, also where I got my first safety heavy code reviews of C++ best practices.
I don't believe those a coincidences, but more collaborations and the right people working together :-)
MesaPy: A Memory-Safe Python Implementation based on PyPy (2018)
I gave this a spin a while back but, unfortunately didn’t get very far since the software and dependencies have grown long in the byte. Since then, I’ve found RustPython [0] which is progressing toward feature parity with CPython but entirely written in Rust (!). A side benefit is that it compiles to Web Assembly, so if you could sandbox it without too much extra overhead.
> Since then, I’ve found RustPython [0] which is progressing toward feature parity with CPython but entirely written in Rust (!). A side benefit is that it compiles to Web Assembly, so if you could sandbox it without too much extra overhead.
It's now possible to run JupyterLab entirely within a browser with jyve (JupyterLab + pyodide) https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide/issues/431
Pyodide:
> Pyodide brings the Python runtime to the browser via WebAssembly, along with the Python scientific stack including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, parts of SciPy, and NetworkX. The packages directory lists over 35 packages which are currently available.
Is the RustPython WASM build more performant or otherwise preferable to brython or pyodide?
Ask HN: Configuration Management for Personal Computer?
Hello HN,
Every couple of years I find myself facing the same old tired routine: migrating my stuff off some laptop or desktop to a new one, usually combined with an OS upgrade. Is there anything like the kind of luxuries we now consider normal on the server side (IaaS; Terraform; maybe Ansible) that can be used to manage your PC and that would make re-imaging it as easy as it is on the server side?
Ansible is worth the extra few minutes, IMHO.
+ (minimal) Bootstrap System playbook
+ Complete System playbook (that references group_vars and host_vars)
+ Per-machine playbooks stored alongside the ansible inventory, group_vars, and host_vars in a separate repo (for machine-specific kernel modules and e.g. touchpad config)
+ User playbook that calls my bootstrap dotfiles shell script
+ Bootstrap dotfiles shell script, which creates symlinks and optionally installs virtualenv+virtualenvwrapper, gitflow and hubflow, and some things with pipsi. https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/b...
+ setup_miniconda.sh that creates a CONDA_ROOT and CONDA_ENVS_PATH for each version of CPython (currently py27-py37)
Over the years, I've worked with Bash, Fabric, Puppet, SaltStack, and now Ansible + Bash
I log shell commands with a script called usrlog.sh that creates a $USER and per-virtualenv tab-delimited logfiles with unique per-terminal-session identifiers and ISO8601 timestamps; so it's really easy to just grep for the apt/yum/dnf commands that I ran ad-hoc when I should've just taken a second to create an Ansible role with `ansible-galaxy init ansible-role-name ` and referenced that in a consolidated system playbook with a `when` clause. https://westurner.github.io/dotfiles/usrlog.html#usrlog
A couple weeks ago I added an old i386 netbook to my master Ansible inventory and system playbook and VScode wouldn't install because VScode Linux is x86-64 only and the machine doesn't have enough RAM; so I created when clauses to exclude VScode and extensions on that box (with host_vars). Gvim with my dotvim works great there too though. Someday I'll merge my dotvim with SpaceVim and give SpaceMacs a try; `git clone; make install` works great, but vim-enhanced/vim-full needs to be installed with the system package manager first so that the vimscript plugin installer works and so that the vim binary gets updated when I update all.
I've tested plenty of Ansible server configs with molecule (in docker containers), but haven't yet taken the time to do a full workstation build with e.g. KVM or VirtualBox or write tests with testinfra. It should be easy enough to just run Ansible as a provisioner in a Vagrantfile or a Packer JSON config. VirtualBox supports multi-monitor VMs and makes USB passthrough easy, but lately Docker is enough for everything but Windows (with a PowerShell script that installs NuGet packages with chocolatey) and MacOS (with a few setup scripts that download and install .dmg's and brew) VMs. Someday I'll write or adapt Ansible roles for Windows and Mac, too.
I still configure browser profiles by hand; but it's pretty easy because I just saved all the links in my tools doc: https://westurner.github.io/tools/#browser-extensions
Someday, I'll do bookmarks sync correctly with e.g. Chromium and Firefox; which'll require extending westurner/pbm to support Firefox SQLite or a rewrite in JS with the WebExtension bookmarks API.
A few times, I've decided to write docs for my dotfiles and configuration management policies like someone else is actually going to use them; it seemed like a good exercise at the time, but invariably I have to figure out what the ultimate command sequence was and put that in a shell script (or a Makefile, which adds a dependency on GNU make that's often worth it)
Clonezilla is great and free, but things get out of date fast in a golden master image. It's actually possible to PXE boot clonezilla with Cobbler, but, AFAICT, there's no good way to secure e.g. per-machine disk or other config with PXE. Apt-cacher-ng can proxy-cache-mirror yum repos, too. Pulp requires a bit of RAM but looks like a solid package caching system. I haven't yet tested how well Squid works as a package cache when all of the machines are simultaneously downloading the exact same packages before a canary system (e.g. in a VM) has populated the package cache.
I'm still learning to do as much as possible with Docker containers and Dockerfiles or REES (Reproducible Execution Environment Specifications) -compatible dependency configs that work with e.g. repo2docker and https://mybinder.org/ (BinderHub)
GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories
This is great news for developers. The trend has been to combine version control and CI for years now. For a timeline see https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/08/built-in-ci-cd-version-c...
This is bad news for the CI providers that depend on GitHub, in particular CircleCI. Luckily for them (or maybe they saw this coming) they recently raised a series D https://circleci.com/blog/we-raised-a-56m-series-d-what-s-ne... and are already looking to add support for more platforms. It is hard to depend on a marketplace when it starts competing with you, from planning (Waffle.io), to dependency scanning (Gemnasium acquired by us), to CI (Travis CI layoff where especially sad).
It is interesting that a lot of the things GitHub is shipping is already part of Azure DevOps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-... The overlap between Azure DevOps and GitHub seems to increase instead of to be reduced. I wonder what the integration story is and what will happen to Azure DevOps.
It's a horrible trend. CI should not be tied to version control. I mean we all have to deal with it now, but I'd much rather have my CI agnostic and not have config files for it checked into the repo.
I've browsed through the article you linked to, one of the subtitles was "Realizing the future of DevOps is a single application". Also a horrible idea: I think it locks developers into a certain workflow which is hard to escape. You have an issue with your setup you can't figure out - happened to me with Gitlab CI - sorry, you're out of luck. Every application is different, DevOps processes is something to be carefully crafted for each particular case with many considerations: large/small company, platform, development cycle, people preferred workflow etc. What I like to do is to have small well tested parts constitute my devops. It's a bad idea to adopt something just because everyone is doing this.
To sum it up, code should be separate from testing, deployment etc. On our team, I make sure developers don't have to think about devops. They know how to deploy and test and they know the workflow and commands. But that's about it.
I'm an operations guy, but I think I have a different perspective. The developers I work with don't have to think about CI/CD, but the configuration still lives in the repo, I'm just a contributer to that repo like they are.
Having CI configuration separate from the code sounds like a nightmare when a code change requires CI configurations to be updated. A new version of code requires a new dependency for instance, there needs to be a way to tie the CI configuration change with a commit that introduced that dependency. That comes automatically when they're in the same repo.
Having CI configuration inside the codebase also sounds like a nightmare when changes to the CI or deployment environment require configuration changes or when multiple CI/deployment environments exist.
For example as a use case: Software has dozens of tagged releases; organization moves from deploying on AWS to deploying in a Kubernetes cluster (requiring at least one change to the deployment configuration). Now, to deploy any of the old tagged releases, every release now has to be updated with the new configuration. This gets messy because there are two different orthogonal sets of versions involved. First, the code being developed has versions and second, the environments for testing, integration, and deployment also change over time and have versions to be controlled.
Even more broadly, consider multiple organizations using the same software package. They will each almost certainly have their own CI infrastructure, so there is no one "CI configuration" that could ever be checked into the repository along with the code without each user having to maintain their own forks/patchsets of the repo with all the pain that entails.
You can create a separate repo with your own CI config that pulls in the code you want to test; and thus ignore the code's CI config file. When something breaks, you'd then need to determine in which repo something changed: in the CI config repo, or the code repo. And then, you have CI events attached to PRs in the CI config repository.
IMHO it makes sense to have CI config version controlled in the same repo as the code. Unless there's a good tool for bisecting across multiple repos and subrepos?
The Fed is getting into the Real-Time payments business
This system will need to interface with other domestic and international settlement and payments networks.
There is thus an opportunity for standards, a need for federation, and a need to make it easy for big players to offer liquidity.
As far as I understand, e.g. Ripple and Stellar solve basically exactly the 24x7x365 RTGS problem that FedNow intends to solve; and, they allow all sorts of assets to be plugged into the network. Could FedNow just use a different UNL (Unique Node List) with participating banks operating trusted validators and/or offering liquidity ("liquidity provisioning")?
Notably, Ripple is specifically positioned to do international interbank real time gross settlement (RTGS) and remittances. Ripple could integrate with FedNow directly. Most efficiently, if it complies with KYC/AML requirements, FedNow could operate an XRP Ledger. Or, each bank could operate XRP Ledgers. https://xrpl.org/become-an-xrp-ledger-gateway.html
Getting thousands of banks to comply with an evolving API / EDI spec is no small task. Blockchain solutions require API compliance, have solutions for governance where there are a number of stakeholders seeking to reach consensus, and lack single points of failure.
Here's to hoping that we've learned something about decentralizing distributed systems for resiliency.
>> In contrast, the XRP Ledger requires 80 percent of validators on the entire network, over a two-week period, to continuously support a change before it is applied. Of the approximately 150 validators today, Ripple runs only 10. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum — where one miner could have 51 percent of the hashing power — each Ripple validator only has one vote in support of an exchange or ordering a transaction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19195050
So, you want to get banks onboard with only one s'coin USD stablecoin; but you don't want to deal with exchanges or FOREX or anything because that's a different thing? And, this is not just yet another ACH with lower clearance time?
> Interledger Architecture
https://interledger.org/rfcs/0001-interledger-architecture/
> Interledger provides for secure payments across multiple assets on different ledgers. The architecture consists of a conceptual model for interledger payments, a mechanism for securing payments, and a suite of protocols that implement this design.
> The Interledger Protocol (ILP) is the core of the Interledger protocol suite. Colloquially, the whole Interledger stack is sometimes referred to as "ILP". Technically, however, the Interledger Protocol is only one layer in the stack.
> Interledger is not a blockchain, a token, nor a central service. Interledger is a standard way of bridging financial systems. The Interledger architecture is heavily inspired by the Internet architecture described in RFC 1122, RFC 1123 and RFC 1009.
[...]
> You can envision the Interledger as a graph where the points are individual nodes and the edges are accounts between two parties. Parties with only one account can send or receive through the party on the other side of that account. Parties with two or more accounts are connectors, who can facilitate payments to or from anyone they're connected to.
> Connectors provide a service of forwarding packets and relaying money, and they take on some risk when they do so. In exchange, connectors can charge fees and derive a profit from these services. In the open network of the Interledger, connectors are expected to compete among one another to offer the best balance of speed, reliability, coverage, and cost.
Why should we prefer an immutable, cryptographically-signed blockchain solution over SQL/BigTable/MQ for FedNow?
Blockchain and payments standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19813340
... Here's the notice and request for comment PDF: "Docket No. OP – 1670: Federal Reserve Actions to Support Interbank Settlement of Faster Payments" https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/file...
"Federal Reserve announces plan to develop a new round-the-clock real-time payment and settlement service to support faster payments" https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...
A Giant Asteroid of Gold Won’t Make Us Richer
> this example shows that real wealth doesn’t actually come from golden hoards. It comes from the productive activities of human beings creating things that other human beings desire.
Value, Price, and Wealth
???
I'd suggest a different triad: cost, price, value.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_va...
Good call. I don't know where I was going with that. Cost, price, value, and wealth.
Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?
Less convertible collectibles like coins and baseball cards (that require energy for exchange) have (over time t): costs of production, marketing, and distribution; retail sales price; market price; and 'value' which is abstract relative (opportunity cost in terms of fiat currency (which is somehow distinct from price at time t (possibly due to 'speculative information')))
Wealth comes from relationships, margins between costs and prices, long term planning, […]
Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?
For concepts as intrinsically fundamental to economics as these are, the agreement and understanding of what they are, even amomg economists, is surprisingly poor. It's not even clear whether or not "wealth" refers to a flow or stock -- Adam Smith uses the term both ways. And much contemporary mainstream 'wealth creation" discussion addresses accounting profit rather than economic wealth. Or broader terms such aas ecological wealth (or natural capital). There's some progress, and Steve Keen has been synthesizing much of it recently, but the terms fare poorly.
A key issue is that "price‘ and "exchange value" are ofteen conflated, creating confusiin with use/ownership value.
Addressing your terms, "cost" and "price", and typically "value", indicate some metric of exchange or opportunity cost (or benefit). Whilst "wealth", as typically used, tends to relate to some store or accumulation. In electrical terms (a potentially, so to speak, useful analogue) the difference between voltage and charge, with current representing some other property, possibly material flows of goods or energy.
The whole question of media for exchange (currency, and the like), and durable forms of financial wealth (land, art, collectibles) is another interesting one, with discussionnby Ricardo and Jevons quite interesting -- both useful and flawed.
And don't even get me started on the near total discounting of accumulated natural capital, say, the 100-300 million year factor of time embodied in fossil fuels. The reasons and rationales for excluding that being fascinating (Ricardo, Tolstoy, Gray, Hotelling, Boulding, Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Keen).
You are correct that all value (and hence wealth) is relative, and hence relational.
TL;DR: Not that I'm aware.
Abusing the PHP Query String Parser to Bypass IDS, IPS, and WAF
Hrm... the solution is to keep your PHP codebase up to date...?
The solution is to throw out your WAF.
Possible solutions:
(1) Change all underscores in WAF rule URL attribute names to the appropriate non-greedy regex. Though I'm not sure about the regex the article suggests: '.' only matches one character, AFAIU.
(2) Add a config parameter to PHP that turns off the magical url parameter name mangling that no webapp should ever depend on ( and have it default to off because if you rely on this 'feature' you should have to change a setting in php.ini anyway )
Ask HN: Scripts/commands for extracting URL article text? (links -dump but)
I'd like to have a Unix script that basically generates a text file named, with the page title, with the article text neatly formatted.
This seems to me to be something that would be so commonly desired by people that it would've been done and done and done a hundred times over by now, but I haven't found the magic search terms to dig up people's creations.
I imagine it starts with "links -dump", but then there's using the title as the filename, and removing the padded left margin, wrapping the text, and removing all the excess linkage.
I'm a beginner-amateur when it comes to shell scripting, python, etc. - I can Google well and usually understand script or program logic but don't have terms memorized.
Is this exotic enough that people haven't done it, or as I suspect does this already exist and I'm just not finding it? Much obliged for any help.
Just for the record in case anyone digs this up on a later Google search, install the newspaper, unidecode, and re python libraries (pip3 install), then:
from sys import argv
from unidecode import unidecode
from newspaper import Article
import re
script, arturl = argv
url = arturl
article=Article(url)
article.download()
article.parse()
title2 = unidecode(article.title)
fname2 = title2.lower()
fname2 = re.sub(r"[^\w\s]", '', fname2)
fname2 = re.sub(r"\s+", '-', fname2)
text2 = unidecode(article.text)
text2 = re.sub(r'\n\s*\n', '\n\n', text2)
f = open( '~/Desktop/' + str(fname2) + '.txt', 'w' )
f.write( str(title2) + '\n\n' )
f.write( str(text2) + '\n' )
f.close()
#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/opt/python3/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3 ~/bin/url2txt.py $1
#!/bin/bash
while IFS='' read -r l || [ -n "$l" ]; do
~/bin/u2t "$l"
done < $1
There could be collisions where `fname2` is the same for different pages; resulting in unintentionally overwriting. A couple possible solutions: generate a random string and append it to the filename, set fname2 to a hash of the URL, replace unsafe filename characters like '/' and/or '\' and/or '\n' with e.g. underscores. IIRC, URLs can be longer than the max filename length of many filesystems, so hashes as filenames are the safest solution. You can generate an index of the fetched URLs and store it with JSON or e.g. SQLite (with Records and/or SQLAlchemy, for example).
If or when you want to parallelize (to do multiple requests at once because most of the time is spent waiting for responses from the network) write-contention for the index may be an issue that SQLite solves for better than a flatfile locking mechanism like creating and deleting an index.json.lock. requests3 and aiohttp-requests support asyncio. requests3 supports HTTP/2 and connection pooling.
SQLite can probably handle storing the text of as many pages as you throw at it with the added benefit of full-text search. Datasette is a really cool interface for sqlite databases of all sorts. https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ecosystem.html#to...
...
Apache Nutch + ElasticSearch / Lucene / Solr are production-proven crawling and search applications: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Nutch
> I imagine it starts with "links -dump", but then there's using the title as the filename,
The title tag may exceed the filename length limit, be the same for nested pages, or contain newlines that must be escaped.
These might be helpful for your use case:
"Newspaper3k: Article scraping & curation" https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper
lazyNLP "Library to scrape and clean web pages to create massive datasets" https://github.com/chiphuyen/lazynlp/blob/master/README.md#s...
scrapinghub/extruct https://github.com/scrapinghub/extruct
> extruct is a library for extracting embedded metadata from HTML markup.
> It also has a built-in HTTP server to test its output as JSON.
> Currently, extruct supports:
> - W3C's HTML Microdata
> - embedded JSON-LD
> - Microformat via mf2py
> - Facebook's Open Graph
> - (experimental) RDFa via rdflib
NPR's Guide to Hypothesis-Driven Design for Editorial Projects
HDD – Hypothesis-Driven Development – Research, Plan, Prototype, Develop, Launch, Review.
The article lists (and links to!) "Lean UX" [1] and Google Ventures' Design Sprint Methodology as inspirations.
[1] "Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021827.do
[2] https://www.gv.com/sprint/
"How To Write A Technical Paper" [3][4] has: (Related Work, System Model, Problem Statement), (Your Solution), (Analysis), (Simulation, Experimentation), (Conclusion)
Gryphon: An open-source framework for algorithmic trading in cryptocurrency
Hey folks, I'm the primary maintainer of Gryphon. The backstory here is: I was one of the founders of Tinker, the trading company that built Gryphon as our in-house trading infrastructure. We operated 2014-18, starting with just a simple arbitrage bot, and slowly grew the operation until our trades were peaking above 20% of daily trading volume on the big exchanges.
The company has since wound down (founders moved on to other projects), but I always thought the code deserved to be shared, so we've open sourced it. Someone trying to do what we did will probably save 1.5 years of engineering effort if they build on Gryphon vs. make their own. As far as I know there isn't anything out there like this, in any market (not just cryptocurrencies).
Hope you guys like it!
> As far as I know there isn't anything out there like this, in any market (not just cryptocurrencies).
How does Gryphon compare to Catalyst (Zipline)? https://github.com/enigmampc/catalyst
They list a few example algorithms: https://enigma.co/catalyst/example-algos.html
"Ask HN: Why would anyone share trading algorithms and compare by performance?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15802834 (pyfolio, popular [Zipline] algos shared through Quantopian)
"Superalgos and the Trading Singularity" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109333 (awesome-quant,)
Looks great!
Though looking at the code -> https://github.com/garethdmm/gryphon/tree/master/gryphon/lib...
Seems quite hard to extend it with new exchanges.
Shouldn't be, you just need to write a wrapper for the exchange API with the interface defined in 'gryphon.lib.exchange.exchange_api_wrapper'. I'll add an article to the docs with more about that soon.
Would CCXT be useful here? https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt
> The ccxt library currently supports the following 135 cryptocurrency exchange markets and trading APIs:
It's possible CCXT could be used to easily wrap other exchanges into gryphon. I'm not familiar with the library so hard to guess if it would be a net win or not.
Thanks for taking the time to open source this.
So is its use case limited to arb? Or are other HFT strategies supported?
It's perfectly general: arb, market making, signal trading, ml, etc. Whatever strategy class you're thinking of, you can probably implement it on Gryphon.
Can you please explain to me how a tool written in python can be used for HFT or market making?
I’m asking because we generally used ASICS and c++ in the past, or more recently rust. Even GPUs are often difficult because they introduce milliseconds of latency.
If you want to restrict the definition of HFT to only sub-millisecond strategies you're correct. But then, all HFT is impossible in crypto, since with web request latency and rate limits, it would be very difficult to get tick speeds even in the 10s of milliseconds. It's fine if you want to call this "algo trading" instead of HFT, but I think a common understanding of the term would include Gryphon's capabilities.
In any case Gryphon uses Cython to compile itself down to C, which isn't quite as good as writing in native C but is a good chunk of the way there.
> In any case Gryphon uses Cython to compile itself down to C, which isn't quite as good as writing in native C but is a good chunk of the way there.
Would there be any advantage to asyncio with uvloop (also written in Cython (on libuv like Node) like Pandas)? https://github.com/MagicStack/uvloop
IDK how many e.g. signals routines benefit from asyncio yet.
Wow. That’s pretty cool.
Been toying with the idea of algo trading on stock market. Nice to have a reference work
I've been playing around with using lstm recurrent nets to find patterns in forex trades, with no real expectation of anything other than learning about recurrent nets (and td convolutional nets). I was able to access 15 years of historical tick data. I would imagine lack of historical pricing data would be an issue for any machine learning approach to crypto trading. Even with 15 years of daily prices I only have ~5500 samples per major currency pair. I've toyed with learning off hourly prices rather than daily, and I've also thought about creating more samples by shifting prices up or down, since perhaps the general patterns would be the same.
Ouch. Out of all the possible subjects to learn NNs on, you have picked by far the most difficult possible. Seriously. If you think of an analogue to rocketry, with the easiest being launching fireworks from a bottle and the other being a mission to Mars, you have picked a Moon landing.
I don’t even know where to begin. Financial data has an extremely low signal to noise ratio and it is fraught with pitfalls. It is highly non-normal, heteroscedastic, non-stationary and frequently changes behavioural regimes. It is irregular, the information content is itself irregular and the prices sold by vendors often have difficult to detect issues that will taint your results until you actually start trading and realise that a fundamental assumption was wrong. You may train a model on one period, and find that the market behaviour has changed and your model is rubbish. Cross validation and backtesting on black box algorithms with heavy parameter tuning is a field of study on it’s own with so many issues that endless papers have been written on each specific nuance.
Successfully building ML models for trading is an extremely difficult discipline that requires a deep understanding of the markets, the idiosyncrasies of market data, statistics and programming. Most quant shops who run successful ML Algos (they are quite rare) have dedicated data teams whose entire remit is to source and clean data. The saying of rubbish in, rubbish out is very true. Even data providers like Reuter’s or Bloomberg frequently have crap data. We pay nearly 500k a year to Reuters, and find errors in their tick data every week. Data like spot forex is a special beast because the market is decentralized. There is no exchange which could provide an authoritative price feed. Trades have been rolled back in the past and if your data feed does not reflect this, you are effectively analysing junk data.
I don’t even want to get started about the fact that trying to train an RNN on 5500 observations is folly. Did you treat the data in any way? The common way to regularise market data for ML is to resample it to information bars. This is not going to work on a daily basis, so you should start off with actual tick data.
Nearly every starry eyed junior quant goes in with the notion that you can just run some fancy ML models on some market data and you’ll get a star trading algo. That a small handful of statistical tests will tell you whether your results are meaningful, whether your data has autocorrelation or mean reverting properties. In reality, ML models are very difficult to train on financial data. Most statistical forecasting tools fail to find relationships and blindly training models on past data very rarely results in more than spurious performance in a back test.
I don’t want to discourage you by any means, but I’d start off with something easier than what you are proposing. Finance firms have entire teams dedicated to what you are trying to do and even they often fail to find anything.
Thanks for the great feedback. I have no expectations for this other than the learning, and it's already been successful on that front. Just seemed like a fun thing to poke at when most other hobbyists seem to be doing image analysis and language modeling. I've crawled a couple of forums and I get that there are a lot of people out there who think they can readily use these techniques to make money. I doubt very much that this will be the outcome in my case :).
Where I am now I am just trying to figure out how to treat the data, whether to normalize or stationarize and how to encode inputs, etc. The reason that I am working with daily prices is that the fantasy output of this would be a model that can inform a one day grid trading strategy. It may very well be that daily prices won't work for this.
Whether there's anything like an equilibrium in cryptoasset markets where there are no underlying fundamentals is debatable. While there's no book price, PoW coin prices might be rationally describable in terms of (average_estimated cost of energy + cost per GH/s + 'speculative value')
A proxy for energy costs, chip costs, and speculative information
Are there standard symbols for this?
Can cryptoasset market returns be predicted with quantum harmonic oscillators as well? What NN topology can learn a quantum harmonic model? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214650
"The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin" (2019) defines a number of symbols that could be standard in [crypto]economics texts. Figure 2 shows the "profitable efficiency" (which says nothing of investor confidence and speculative information and how we maybe overvalue teh security (in 2007-2009)). Figure 5 lists upper and lower estimates for the BTC network's electricity use. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7
Here's a cautionary dialogue about correlative and causal models that may also be relevant to a cryptoasset price NN learning experiment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163734
Wind-Powered Car Travels Downwind Faster Than the Wind
NOAA upgrades the U.S. global weather forecast model
> Working with other scientists, Lin developed a model to represent how flowing air carries these substances. The new model divided the atmosphere into cells or boxes and used computer code based on the laws of physics to simulate how air and chemical substances move through each cell and around the globe.
> The model paid close attention to conserving energy, mass and momentum in the atmosphere in each box. This precision resulted in dramatic improvements in the accuracy and realism of the atmospheric chemistry.
Global Forecast System > Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Forecast_System#Future
A plan to change how Harvard teaches economics
This isn't an economics class. It's a public policy class. Here are the course topics:[1]
- Part I: Equality of Opportunity
- Part II: Education
- Part III: Racial Disparities
- Part IV: Health
- Part V: Criminal Justice
- Part VI: Climate Change
- Part VII: Tax Policy
- Part VIII: Economic Development and Institutional Change
This really belongs in Harvard's "JFK School of Government", not economics.
Possible topics for a modern economics intro class:
- Instability and equilibrium, or why markets oscillate.
- From zero to one, the tendency to and effects of monopoly and near-monopoly.
- Externalities, their uses and discontents.
- Debt vs. equity vs. what tax policy rewards
- Scarce resources that don't map to money - attention and time.
- Finance as a system decoupled from productive activity
[1] https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/E...
Is there a single book that covers all that? That would be awesome.
Schools like Harvard don’t teach from a book.
Wrong side of the Atlantic. I didn’t have to buy a single textbook my entire undergrad because we had libraries and lecture notes. Required textbooks are far more a US thing than most other countries.
Harvard absolutely has courses taught from a book. I’m sure Mankiw requires his textbook for Harvard’s intro econ course. He wrote it, he thinks it’s good.
And he's made $42 million in royalties on the book. It's almost endearing how economists claim they are somehow immune to incentives, until you pause to consider they are primarily employed as apologists for the continuation of rent-seeking policies that entrench the rich and mighty.
> apologists for the continuation of rent-seeking policies that entrench the rich and mighty.
This.
"THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE" https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed...
> INCREASING THE INCOME SHARE TO THE BOTTOM 20 PERCENT OF CITIZENS BY A MERE ONE PERCENT RESULTS IN A 0.38 PERCENTAGE POINT JUMP IN GDP GROWTH.
> The IMF report, authored by five economists, presents a scathing rejection of the trickle-down approach, arguing that the monetary philosophy has been used as a justification for growing income inequality over the past several decades. "Income distribution matters for growth," they write. "Specifically, if the income share of the top 20 percent increases, then GDP growth actually declined over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down."
"Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective" (2015) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%22...
I'll add that we tend to overlook the level of government spending during periods trickle-down economics and confound. Change in government spending (somewhat unfortunately regardless of revenues) is a relevant factor.
Let's make this economy great again? How about you identify the decade(s) you're referring to and I'll show you the tax revenue (on income and now capital gains), federal debt per capital, and the growth in GDP.
The difference big data/data science/empirical study and 'classical' economics (by which I'd include any system of economics that seeks to explain human behavior via an underlying metatheory) is that a primarily empirical approach obscures the necessary underlying theory present in any experiment where you're trying to fit data to a curve.
For example, when you run a science experiment and you plot the data, you may find that you're looking at a line. While this is an interesting finding, it has zero predictive value for anything other than the exact situation you've collected data for. In order to formulate scientific law, you first must (a) believe that such a thing exists and (b) have some theory as to what shape the curve ought to fit. For example, a naive look at physics using an 'empirical' approach might incorrectly conclude that force is mass times acceleration. While moderately useful for many problems, this offers little predictive power in the general case. In order to actually formulate a law that can be of predictive value, you have to first consider various other laws and axioms (such as the constant speed of light for force), at which point -- by deduction, without any need of empirism -- you determine that this is wrong, and you need another kind of equation to fit your data to.
I don't know if the simplistic demand curves drawn in the original text book are correct or not. However, at least those are based on a particular set of assumptions that can be validated or not. The kind of empiricism put forth by Mr Chetty does not offer this at all.
All this is to say that, while data is useful for validation, it is not useful for prediction. The last thing we need is a black-box machine learning model to make major economic decisions off of. What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'
> All this is to say that, while data is useful for validation, it is not useful for prediction. The last thing we need is a black-box machine learning model to make major economic decisions off of. What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'
Hand-wavy theory - predicated upon physical-world models of equillibrium which are themselves classical and incomplete - without validation is preferable to empirical models? Please.
Estimating the predictive power of some LaTeX equations is a different task than measuring error of a trained model.
If the model does not fit all of the big data, the error term is higher; regardless of whether the model was pulled out of a hat in front of a captive audience or deduced though inference from actual data fed through an unbiased analysis pipeline.
If the 'black-box predictive model' has lower error for all available data, the task is then to reverse the model! Not to argue for unvalidated theory.
Here are a few discussions regarding validating economic models, some excellent open econometric lectures (as notebooks that are unfortunately not in an easily-testable programmatic form), the lack of responsible validation, and some tools and datasets that may be useful for validating hand-wavy classical economic theories:
"When does the concept of equilibrium work in economics?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214650
> "Lectures in Quantitative Economics as Python and Julia Notebooks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083479 (data sources (pandas-datareader, pandaSDMX), tools, latex2sympy)
That's just an equation in a PDF.
(edit) Here's another useful thread: "Ask HN: Data analysis workflow?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798244
Most of the interesting economic questions are inference problems, not prediction problems The question is not "what is the best guess of y[i] given these values of x[i]'s", but what would y[i] have been for this very individual i (or country in macro-economics) if we could have wound back the clock and change the values of x[i]'s for this individual. The methods that economists know and use may not be the best, but the standard ML prediction methods do not address the same questions, and data scientists without a social / economic / medical background are often not even aware of the distinction.
Economists and social scientists try to do non-experimental causal inference. Maybe they're not good at it, maybe the very problem is unsolvable, but it's not because they don't know how Random Forests or RNNs work. Economists already know that students from single parent families do worse at school than from married families. If the problem is just to predict individual student results, number of parents in the household is certainly a good predictor. The problem facing economists is, would encouraging marriage or discouraging diveroce improve student results? Nothing in PyTorch or Tensorflow will help with the answer..
Backtesting algorithmic trading algorithms is fairly simple: what actions would the model have taken given the available data at that time, and how would those trading decisions have affected the single objective dependent variable. Backtesting, paper trading, live trading.
Medicine (and also social sciences) is indeed more complex; but classification and prediction are still the basis for making treatment recommendations, for example.
Still, the task really is the same. A NN (like those that Torch, Theano, TensorFlow, and PyTorch produce; now with the ONNX standard for neural network model interchange) learns complex relations and really doesn't care about causality: minimize the error term. Recent progress in reducing the size of NN models e.g. for offline natural language classification on mobile devices has centered around identifying redundant neuronal connections ("from 100GB to just 0.5GB"). Reversing a NN into a far less complex symbolic model (with variable names) is not a new objective. NNs are being applied for feature selection, XGBoost wins many Kaggle competitions, and combinations thereof appear to be promising.
Actually testing second-order effects of evidence-based economic policy recommendations is certainly a complex highly-multivariate task (with unfortunate ideological digression that presumes a higher-order understanding based upon seeming truisms that are not at all validated given, in many instances, any data). A causal model may not be necessary or even reasonably explainable; and what objective dependent variables should we optimize for? Short term growth or long-term prosperity with environmental sustainability?
... "Please highly weight voluntary sustainability reporting metrics along with fundamentals" when making investments and policy decisions?
Were/are the World3 models causal? Many of their predictions have subsequently been validated. Are those policy recommendations (e.g. in "The Limits to Growth") even more applicable today, or do we need to add more labeled data and "Restart and Run All"?
...
From https://research.stlouisfed.org/useraccount/fredcast/faq/ :
> FREDcast™ is an interactive forecasting game in which players make forecasts for four economic releases: GDP, inflation, employment, and unemployment. All forecasts are for the current month—or current quarter in the case of GDP. Forecasts must be submitted by the 20th of the current month. For real GDP growth, players submit a forecast for current-quarter GDP each month during the current quarter. Forecasts for each of the four variables are scored for accuracy, and a total monthly score is obtained from these scores. Scores for each monthly forecast are based on the magnitude of the forecast error. These monthly scores are weighted over time and accumulated to give an overall performance.
> Higher scores reflect greater accuracy over time. Past months' performances are downweighted so that more-recent performance plays a larger part in the scoring.
The #GobalGoals Targets and Indicators may be our best set of variables to optimize for from 2015 through 2030; I suppose all of them are economic.
Using predictive models for policy is not new, in fact it was the standard approach long before more inferential models, and the famed Lucas critique precisely targets a primitive approach similar to what you are proposing.
The issue is the following: In economics, one is interested in an underlying parameter of a complex equilibrium system (or, if you wish, a non-equilibrium complex system of multi-agentic behavior). This may be, for example, some pricing parameter for a given firm - say - how your sold units react to setting a price.
Economics faces two basic issues:
First, any predictive model (like a NN or simple regression) that takes price as an input, will not correctly estimate the sensitivity of revenue to price. It is actually usually the case, that the inference is reversed.
A model where price is input, and sold units or revenue is output (or vice-versa) will predict (you can check that using pretty much any dataset of prices and outputs) that higher prices lead to higher outputs, because that is the association in the data. Of course we know that in truth, prices and outputs are co-determined. They are simultaneous phenomena, and regressing one on the other is not sufficient to "causally identify" the correct effect.
This is independent of how sophisticated your model is otherwise. Fitting a better non-linear representation does not help.
The solution is of course to reduce down these "endogenous" phenomena to their basic ingredients. Say you have cost data, and some demand parameters. Then, using a regression model (or NN) to predict the vector of endogenous outcome variables will work, and roughly give you the right inference.
Then, as a firm, you are able to use these (more) exogenous predictive variables to find your correct pricing.
This is not new, pops up everywhere in social science, is the basis of a gigantic literature called econometrics, and really has nothing to do with how you do the prediction.
The only thing that NN add are better predictions (better fitting) and the ability to deal with more data. As this inferential problem shows, using more (and more fine-grained) data is indeed crucial to predicting what a firm should do.
BUT, it is crucial to understand and reason about the underlying causality FIRST, because otherwise even the most sophisticated statistical approach will simply give you wrong results.
Secondly, the counterfactual data for economic issues is usually very scarce. The approach taken by machine learning is problematic, not only because of potentially wrong inference, but also because two points in time may simply not be based on comparable data-generating processes.
In fact, this is exactly the blindness that led to people missing the financial crisis. Of course, with enough data, and long enough samples, one should expect to be become pretty good at predicting economic outcomes. But experience has shown that in economics, these data are simply too scarce. The unobserved variation between two quarters, two years, two countries, two firms (etc.) is simply very large and has fat tails. This leads to spontaneous breakdowns of such predicitive models.
Taking these two issues together, we see that better non-linear function approximation is not the solution to our problems. Instead, it is a methodological improvement that must be used in conjunction with what we have learned about causality.
Indeed the literature moves into a different direction. Good economic science nowadays means to identify effects via natural experiments and other exogenous shifts that can plausibly show causality.
Of course such experiments are more rare, and more difficult, the larger the scale becomes. Which is why Macroeconomics is arguably the "worst science" in economics, while things like auctions and microstructure of markets are actually surprisingly good science (nowadays).
Doors are wide open for ML techniques, but really only to the point that they are useful in operationalizing more and better data.
Anyone trying to understand economic phenomena needs to be keenly aware of how inference can be done, which requires an understanding (or an approach to) - that is, a theory - of the underlying mechanisms.
Yes, some combination of variables/features grouped and connected with operators that correlate to an optima (some of which are parameters we can specify) that occurs immediately or after a period of lag during which other variables of the given complex system are dangerously assumed to remain constant.
> In fact, this is exactly the blindness that led to people missing the financial crisis
ML was not necessary to recognize the yield curve inversion as a strongly predictive signal correlating to subsequent contraction.
An NN can certainly learn to predict according to the presence or magnitude of a yield curve inversion and which combinations of other features.
- [ ] Exercise: Learning this and other predictive signals by cherry-picking data and hand-optimizing features may be an extremely appropriate exercise.
"This field is different because it's nonlinear, very complex, there are unquantified and/or uncollected human factors, and temporal"
Maybe we're not in agreement about whether AI and ML can do causal inference just as well if not better than humans manipulating symbols with human cognition and physical world intuition. The time is nigh!
In general, while skepticism and caution are appropriate, many fields suffer from a degree of hubris which prevents them from truly embracing stronger AI in their problem domain. (A human person cannot mutate symbol trees and validate with shuffled and split test data all night long)
> Anyone trying to understand economic phenomena needs to be keenly aware of how inference can be done, which requires an understanding (or an approach to) - that is, a theory - of the underlying mechanisms.
I read this as "must be biased by the literature and willing to disregard an unacceptable error term"; but also caution against rationalizing blind findings which can easily be rationalized as logical due to any number of cognitive biases.
Compared to AI, we're not too rigorous about inductive or deductive inference; we simply store generalizations about human behavior and predict according to syntheses of activations in our human NNs.
If you're suggesting that the information theory that underlies AI and ML is insufficient to learn what we humans have learned in a few hundred years of observing and attempting to optimize, I must disagree (regardless of the hardness or softness of the given complex field). Beyond a few combinations/scenarios, our puny little brains are no match for our department's new willing AI scientist.
> ML was not necessary to recognize the yield curve inversion as a strongly predictive signal correlating to subsequent contraction.
> An NN can certainly learn to predict according to the presence or magnitude of a yield curve inversion and which combinations of other features.
> - [ ] Exercise: Learning this and other predictive signals by cherry-picking data and hand-optimizing features may be an extremely appropriate exercise.
If the financial crisis has not yet occurred, how will the NN learn a relationship that does not exist in the data?
The exercise of cherry picking data and hand-optimizing is equivalent to applying theory to your statistical problem. It is what is required if you lack data points - using ML or otherwise. Nevertheless, we (as in humans) are bad at it. Speaking of the financial crisis. It was not AI's that picked up on it, it was some guys applying sophisticated and deep understanding of causal relationships. And that so few people did this, shows how bad we humans are at doing this implicitly and automatically by just looking at data!
> Maybe we're not in agreement about whether AI and ML can do causal inference just as well if not better than humans manipulating symbols with human cognition and physical world intuition. The time is nigh! In general, while skepticism and caution are appropriate, many fields suffer from a degree of hubris which prevents them from truly embracing stronger AI in their problem domain. (A human person cannot mutate symbol trees and validate with shuffled and split test data all night long)
ML and AI certainly can do causal inference. But then you have to do causal inference. Again, prediction on historical data is not equivalent to causal analysis, and neither is backtesting or validation. At the end of the day, AI and ML improves on predictions, but the distinction of causal analysis is a qualitative one.
> I read this as "must be biased by the literature and willing to disregard an unacceptable error term"; but also caution against rationalizing blind findings which can easily be rationalized as logical due to any number of cognitive biases.
No. My point is that for causal analysis, you have to leverage assumptions that are beyond your data set. Where these come from is besides the point. You will always employ a theory, implicitly or explicitly.
The major issue is not the we use theories, but rather that we might do it implicitly, hiding the assumptions about the DGP that allows causal inference. This is where humans are bad. Theories are just theories. With precise assumptions giving us causal identification, we are in a good position to argue where we stand.
If we just run algorithms without really understand what is going on, we are just repeating the mistakes from the last forty years!
> If you're suggesting that the information theory that underlies AI and ML is insufficient to learn what we humans have learned in a few hundred years of observing and attempting to optimize, I must disagree (regardless of the hardness or softness of the given complex field). Beyond a few combinations/scenarios, our puny little brains are no match for our department's new willing AI scientist.
All the information theory I have seen in any of the Machine Learning textbooks I have picked up is methodologically equivalent to statistics. In particular, the standard textbooks (Elements, Murhpy etc.) treatment of information theory would only allow causal identification under the exact same conditions that the statistics literature treats.
I fail to see the difference, or what AI in particular adds. The issue of causal inference is a "hot topic" in many fields, including AI, but the underlying philosophical issues are not exactly new. This includes information theory.
You seem to think that ML has somehow solved this problem. From my reading of these books, I certainly disagree. Causal inference is certainly POSSIBLE - just as in statistics, but ML doesn't give it to you for free!
In particular, note the following issue: To show causal identification, you need to make assumptions on your DGP (exogenous variation, timing, graphical causal relations ... whatever). Even if these assumptions are very implicit, they do exist. Just by looking at data, and running a model, you do not get causal inference. It can not be done "within" the system/model.
If you bake these things into your AI, then it, too makes these assumptions. There really is no difference. For example, I could imagine an AI that can identify likely exogenous variations in the data and use them to predict counterfactuals. That's probably not too far off, if it doesn't exist already. But, this is still based on the assumption that these variations are, indeed exogenous, which can never be proven within the DGP.
In contrast, I find that most "AI scientists" care very much about prediction, and very little about causal inference. I don't mean this subfield doesn't exist. But it is a subfield. In contrast, for many non-AI scientists, causal inference IS the fundamental question, and prediction is only an afterthought. ML in practice involved doing correct experiments (AB testing), at best. It will sooner or later also adopt all other causal inference techniques. But, my point stands, I have yet to see what ML adds. Enlighten me!
AI, ML and stats will merge, if they haven't already. The distinction will disappear. I believe the issues will not. I employ a lot of AI/ML techniques in my scientific work. Never have they solved the underlying issue of causal inference for me!
> AI, ML and stats will merge, if they haven't already. The distinction will disappear. I believe the issues will not.
All tools are misapplied; including economics professionals and their advice.
Here's a beautiful Venn diagram of "Colliding Web Sciences" which includes economics as a partially independent category: https://www.google.com/search?q=colliding+web+sciences&tbm=i...
A causal model is a predictive model. We must validate the error of a causal model.
Why are theoretic models hand-wavy? "That's just because noise, the model is correct." No, such a model is insufficient to predict changes in dependent variables when in the presence of noise; which is always the case. How does validating a causal model differ from validating a predictive model with historical and future data?
Yield-curve inversion as a signal can be learned by human and artificial NNs. Period. There are a few false positives in historical data: indeed, describe the variance due to "noise" by searching for additional causal and correlative relations in additional datasets.
I searched for "python causal inference" and found a few resources on the first page of search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=python+causal+inference
CausalInference: https://pypi.org/project/CausalInference/
DoWhy: https://github.com/microsoft/dowhy
CausalImpact (Python port of the R package): https://github.com/dafiti/causalimpact
"What is the best Python package for causal inference?" https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-Python-package-for-ca...
Search: graphical model "information theory" [causal] https://www.google.com/search?q=graphical+model+%22informati...
Search: opencog causal inference https://www.google.com/search?q=opencog+causal+inference (MOSES, PLN,)
If you were to write a pseudocode algorithm for an econometric researcher's process of causal inference (and also their cognitive processes (as executed in a NN with a topology)), how would that read?
(Edit) Something about the sufficiency of RL (Reinforcement Learning) for controlling cybernetic systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics
What's the point of dumping a bunch of Google results here? At least half the results are about implementations of pretty traditional etatistical / econometric inference techniques. The Rudin causal inference framework requires either randomized controlled trials or for propensity score models an essentially unverifiable separate model step.
Google's CausalImpact model, despite having been featured on Google's AI blog, is a statistical/econometric model (essentially the same as https://www.jstor.org/stable/2981553). It leaves it up to the user to find and designate a set of control variables, which has to be designated by the user to be unaffected by the treatment. This is not done algorithmically, and has very little to do with RNNs, Random Forests or regression regularization.
> If you were to write a pseudocode algorithm for an econometric researcher's process of causal inference (and also their cognitive processes (as executed in a NN with a topology)), how would that read?
[1] Set up a proper RCT, that is randomly assign the treatment to different subjects [2] Calculate the outcome diffences between the treated and untreated
For A/B testing your website, the work division between [1] and [2] might be 50-50, or at least at similar order of magnitudes.
For the questions that academic economists wrstle with, say, estimate the effect of increasing school funding / decreasing class size, the effect of shifts between tax deductions vs tax credits vs changing tax rates or bands, or of the different outcome on GDP growth and unemployment of monetary vs fiscal expansion [1] would be 99.9999% of the work, or completely impossible.
Faced with the impracticallity/impossiblility of proper experiments, academic micro-economists have typically resorted to Instrumental Variable regressions. AFAICT finding (or rather, convincing the audience that you have) a proper instrument is not very amendable to automation or data mining.
In academic macro-economics (and hence at Serious Institutions such as central banks and the IMF), the most popular approaches to building causal models in the last 3 or 4 decades have probably been 1) making a bunch of unrealistic assumpsions of the behaviour individual agents (microfoundations/DSGE models) 2) making a bunch of uninterpretable and unverifyable technical assumptions on the parameters in a generic dynamic stochastic vector process fitted to macro-aggregates (Structural VAR with "identifying restrictions") 3) manually grouping different events in different countries from different periods in history as "similar enough" to support your pet theory: lowering interest rates can lead to a) high inflation, high unemployment (USA 1970s), b) high inflation, low unemployment (Japan 1970s), b) low inflation, high unemployment (EU 2010s) c) low inflation, low unemployment (USA, Japan past 2010s)
I really don't see how a RL would help with any of this. Care to come up with something concrete?
> What's the point of dumping a bunch of Google results here? At least half the results are about implementations of pretty traditional etatistical / econometric inference techniques.
Here are some tools for causal inference (and a process for finding projects to contribute to instead of arguing about insufficiency of AI/ML for our very special problem domain here). At least one AGI implementation doesn't need to do causal inference in order to predict the outcomes of actions in a noisy field.
Weather forecasting models don't / don't need to do causal inference.
> A/B testing
Is multi-armed bandit feasible for the domain? Or, in practice, are there too many concurrent changes in variables to have any sort of a controlled experiment. Then, aren't you trying to do causal inference with mostly observational data.
> I really don't see how a RL would help with any of this. Care to come up with something concrete?
The practice of developing models and continuing on with them when they seem to fit and citations or impact reinforce is very much entirely an exercise in RL. This is a control system with a feedback loop. A "Cybernetic system". It's not unique. It's not too hard for symbolic or neural AI/ML. Stronger AI can or could do [causal] inference.
I am at loss at what you want to say to me, but let me reiterate:
Any learning model by itself is a statistical model. Statistical models are never automatically causal models, albeit causal models are statistical models.
Several causal models can be observationally equivalent to a single statistical model, but the substantive (inferential) implications on doing "an intervention" on the DGP differ.
It is therefore not enough to validate and run on a model on data. Several causal models WILL validate on the same data, but their implications are drastically different. The data ALONE provides you no way to differentiate (we say, identify) the correct causal model without any further restrictions.
By extension, it is impossible for any ML mechanism to predict unobserved interventions without being a causal model.
ML and AI models CAN be causal models, which is the case if they are based on further assumptions about the DGP. For example, they may be graphical models, SCM/SEM etc. These restrictions can be derived algorithmically, based on all sorts of data, tuning, coding and whatever. It really doesn't change the distinction between causal and statistical analysis.
The way these models become causal is based on assumptions that constitute a theory in the scientific sense. These theories can then of course also be validated. But this is not based on learning from historical data alone. You always have to impose sufficient restrictions on your model (e.g. the DGP) to make such causal inference.
This is not new, but for your benefit, I basically transferred the above from an AI/ML book on causal analysis.
AI/ML can do causal analysis, because its statistics. AI/ML are not separate from these issues, do not solve these issues ex-ante, are not "better" than other techniques except on the dimensions that they are better as statistical techniques, AND, most importantly, causal application necessarily implies a theory.
Whether this is implicit or explicit is up to the researcher, but there are dangers associated with implicit causal reasoning.
And as Pearl wrote (who is not a fan of econometrics by any means!), the issue of causal inference was FIRST raised by econometricians BASED on combining the structure of economic models with statistical inference. In the 1940's.
I mean I get the appeal to trash talk social sciences, but when it comes to causal inference, you probably picked exactly the wrong one.
You are free to disregard economic theory. But you can not claim to do causal analysis without any theory. Doing so implicitly is dangerous. Furthermore, you are wrong in the sense that economic theory has put causal inference issues at the forefront of econometric research, and is therefore good for science even if you dislike those theories.
And by the way, I can come up with a good number of (drastic, hypothetical) policy interventions that would break your inference about a market crash - an inference you only were able to make once you saw such a market crash at least once.
If this dependence is broken, your non-causal model will no longer work, because the relationship between yield curve and market crash is not a physical constant fact. What you did to make it a causal inference is implicitly assume a theory about how markets work (e.g. - as they do right now -) and that it will stay this way. Actually, you did a lot more, but that's enough.
Now, you and me, we can both agree that your model with yield curves is good enough. We could even agree that you would have found it before the financial crashes, and are a billionaire. But the commonality we agree upon is a context that defines a theory.
Some alien that has been analyzing financial systems all across the universe may disagree, saying that your statistical model is in fact highly sensitive to Earth's political, societal and natural context.
Such is the difficulty of causal analysis.
> By extension, it is impossible for any ML mechanism to predict unobserved interventions without being a causal model.
In lieu of a causal model, when I ask an economist what they think is going to happen and they aren't aware of any historical data - there is no observational data collected following the given combination of variables we'd call an event or an intervention - is it causal inference that they're doing in their head? (With their NN)
> Now, you and me, we can both agree that your model with yield curves is good enough.
Yield curves alone are insufficient due to the rate of false positives. (See: ROC curves for model evalutation just like everyone else)
> We could even agree that you would have found it before the financial crashes,
The given signal was disregarded as a false positive by the appointed individuals at the time; why?
> Some alien that has been analyzing financial systems all across the universe may disagree,
You're going to run out of clean water and energy, and people will be willing to pay for unhealthy sugar water and energy-inefficient transaction networks with a perception of greater security.
That we need Martian scientist as an approach is, IMHO, necessary because of our learned biases; where we've inferred relations that have been reinforced which cloud our assessment of new and novel solutions.
> Such is the difficulty of causal analysis.
What a helpful discussion. Thanks for explaining all of this to me.
Now, I need to go write my own definitions for counterfactual and DGP and include graphical models in there somewhere.
A further hint, here is a great book about causal analysis from a ML/AI perspective
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-causal-inference
I feel like you will benefit from reading this!
It's free!
> In lieu of a causal model, when I ask an economist what they think is going to happen and they aren't aware of any historical data - there is no observational data collected following the given combination of variables we'd call an event or an intervention - is it causal inference that they're doing in their head? (With their NN)
It's up for debate if NN's represent what is going on in our heads. But let's for a moment assume it is so.
Then indeed, an economist leverages a big set of data and assumptions about causal connections to speculate how this intervention would change the DGP (the modules in the causal model) and therefore how the result would change.
An AI could potentially do the same (if that is really what we humans do), but so far, we certainly lack the ability to program such a general AI. The reason is, in part, because we have difficulty creating causal AI models even for specialized problems. In that sense, humans are much more sophisticated right now.
It is important to note that such a hypothetical AI would create a theory, based on all sorts of data, analogies, prior research and so forth, just like economists do.
It does not really matter if a scientist, or an AI, does the theorizing. The distinction is between causal and non-causal analysis.
The value of formal theory is to lay down assumptions and tautological statements that leave no doubt about what the theory is. If we see that the theory is wrong, because we disagree on the assumptions, this is actually very good and speaks for the theory. Lot's of social sciences is plagued by "general theories" that can never really shown to be false ex ante. And given that theories can never be empirically "proven", only validated in the statistical sense, this leads to a many parallel theories of doubtful value. Take a gander into sociology if you want to see this in action.
Secondly, and this is very important, is that we learn from models. This is not often recognized. What we learn from writing down models is how mechanics or modules interact. These interactions, highly logical, are USUALLY much less doubtful than the prior assumptions. For example, if price and revenues are equilibrium phenomena, we LEARN from the model that we CAN NOT estimate them with a standard regression model!
This is exactly what lead to causal analysis in this case, because earlier we would literally regress price on quantity or production on price etc. and be happy about it. But the results were often even in the entirely wrong direction!
Instead, looking at the theory, we understood the mechanical intricacies of the process we supposedly modeled, and saw that we estimated something completely different than what we interpreted. Causal analysis, among other things, tackles this issue by asking "what it is really that we estimate here?".
> Hand-wavy theory - predicated upon physical-world models of equillibrium which are themselves classical and incomplete - without validation is preferable to empirical models? Please.
My friend, you are strawmanning.
I said,
> What we do need is proper models that are then validated, which don't necessarily need 'big data.'
Which agrees with you. I said we need both and, not one or the other.
> If the model does not fit all of the big data, the error term is higher; regardless of whether the model was pulled out of a hat in front of a captive audience or deduced though inference from actual data fed through an unbiased analysis pipeline.
Big data without a model is still only valid for the scenario the data were collected in
> If the 'black-box predictive model' has lower error for all available data, the task is then to reverse the model! Not to argue for unvalidated theory.
Certainly, but we should simultaneously recognize that any model so conceived is still only valid in the situations the data were collected in, which makes the not necessarily useful for the future. You could turn such an equation into an economic philosophy, but you'd have to do a lot more, non metric, work.
How can you possibly be arguing that we should not be testing models with all available data?
All models are limited by the data they're trained from; regardless of whether they are derived through rigorous, standardized, unbiased analysis or though laudable divine inspiration.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084622 :
> pandas-datareader can pull data from e.g. FRED, Eurostat, Quandl, World Bank: https://pandas-datareader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/remote_da...
> pandaSDMX can pull SDMX data from e.g. ECB, Eurostat, ILO, IMF, OECD, UNSD, UNESCO, World Bank; with requests-cache for caching data requests: https://pandasdmx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#supported-data-p...
> All models are limited by the data they're trained from; regardless of whether they are derived through rigorous, standardized, unbiased analysis or though laudable divine inspiration.
Some of the data we have isn't training data. Purely data-driven models tend to be ensnared by Goodhart's law.
For example, suppose we're issuing 30-year term loans and we have some data that shows that people with things like country club memberships and foie gras on their credit card statements have a higher tendency not to miss payments. So we use that information to make our determination.
But people are aware we're doing this and the same data is externally available, so now people start to waste resources on extravagant luxuries in order to qualify for a loan or a low interest rate, and that only makes it more likely that they ultimately default. However, that consequence doesn't become part of the data set until years have passed and the defaults actually occur, and in the meantime we're using flawed reasoning to issue loans. When we finally figure that out after ten years, the new data we use then will have some fresh different criteria for people to game, because the data is always from the past rather than the future.
We've already seen the kind of damage this can do. Politicians see data that college-educated people are better off so subsidize college loans, only to discover that the signal from having a degree that caused it to result in such gainful employment is diluted as it becomes more common, and subsidizing loans results in price inflation, and making a degree a prerequisite for jobs that shouldn't require it creates incentives for degree mills that pump out credentials but not real education.
To get out of this we have to consider not only what people have done in the past but how they are likely to respond to a given policy change, for which we have no historical data prior to when the policy is enacted, and so we need to make those predictions based on logic in addition to data or we go astray.
> To get out of this we have to consider not only what people have done in the past but how they are likely to respond to a given policy change, for which we have no historical data prior to when the policy is enacted, and so we need to make those predictions based on logic in addition to data or we go astray.
"Pete, it's a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart."
Logically, we might have said "prohibition will reduce substance abuse harms" but the actual data indicates that margins increased. Then, we look at the success of Portugal's decriminalization efforts and cannot at all validate our logical models.
Similarly, we might've logically claimed that "deregulation of the financial industry will help everyone" or "lowering taxes will help everyone" and the data does not support.
So, while I share the concerns about Responsible AI and encoding biases (and second-order effects of making policy recommendations according to non-causal models without critically, logically thinking first) I am very skeptical about our ability to deduce causal relations without e.g. blind, randomized, longitudinal, interventional studies (which are unfortunately basically impossible to do with [economic] policy because there is no "ceteris paribus")
https://personalmba.com/second-order-effects/
"Causal Inference Book" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17504366
> https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-...
> Causal inference (Causal reasoning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_reasoning )
The virtue of logic isn't that your model is always correct or that it should be adhered to without modification despite contrary evidence, it's that it allows you to have one to begin with. It's a method of choosing which experiments to conduct. If you think prohibition will reduce substance abuse but then you try it and it doesn't, well, you were wrong, so end prohibition.
This is also a strong argument for "laboratories of democracy" and local control -- if everybody agrees what to do then there is no dispute, but if they don't then let each local region have their own choice, and then we get to see what happens. It allows more experiments to be run at once. Then in the worst case the damage of doing the wrong thing is limited to a smaller area than having the same wrong policy be set nationally or internationally, and in the best case different choices are good in different ways and we get more local diversity.
> If you think prohibition will reduce substance abuse but then you try it and it doesn't, well, you were wrong, so end prohibition.
Maybe we're at a local optima, though. Maybe this is a sign that we should just double down, surge on in there and get the job done by continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results. Maybe it's not the spec but the implementation.
Recommend a play according to all available data, and logic.
> This is also a strong argument for "laboratories of democracy" and local control -- if everybody agrees what to do then there is no dispute, but if they don't then let each local region have their own choice, and then we get to see what happens. It allows more experiments to be run at once. Then in the worst case the damage of doing the wrong thing is limited to a smaller area than having the same wrong policy be set nationally or internationally, and in the best case different choices are good in different ways and we get more local diversity.
"Adjusting for other factors," the analysis began.
- [ ] Exercise / procedure to be coded: Brainstorm and identify [non-independent] features that may create a more predictive model (a model with a lower error term). Search for confounding variables outside of the given data.
The New York Times course to teach its reporters data skills is now open-source
It's more work to verify all formulas that reference unnamed variables in a spreadsheet than to review the code inputs and outputs in a notebook.
"Teaching Pandas and Jupyter to Northwestern journalism students" [in DC] https://www.californiacivicdata.org/2017/06/07/dc-python-not...
> http://www.firstpythonnotebook.org/
You can also develop d3.js visualizations — just like NYT — with jupyter notebooks and whichever language(s).
"Data-Driven Journalism" ("ddj") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-driven_journalism
http://datadrivenjournalism.net/
"The Data Journalism Handbook 1" https://datajournalism.com/read/handbook/one
"The Data Journalism Handbook 2" https://datajournalism.com/read/handbook/two
While there are a number of ScholarlyArticle journals that can publish notebooks, I'm not aware of any newspapers that are prepared to publish notebooks as NewsArticles. It's pretty easy to `jupyter convert --to html` and `--to markdown` or just 'Save as'
Regarding expressing facts as verifiable claims with structured data in HTML and/or blockchains: "Fact Checks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529140
Does this course recommend linking to every source dataset and/or including full citations (with DOI) in the article? Does this course recommend getting a free DOI for the published revision of an e.g. GitHub project repository (containing data, and notebooks and/or the article text) with Zenodo?
No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?
Group decision-making > Formal systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_decision-making#Formal_s...
> Consensus decision-making, Voting-based methods, Delphi method, Dotmocracy
Consensus decision-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
There's a field that some people are all calling "Collaboration Engineering". I learned about this from a university course in Collaboration.
6 Patterns of Collaboration [GRCOEB] — Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus
7 Layers of Collaboration [GPrAPTeToS] — Goals, Products, Activities, Patterns of Collaboration, Techniques, Tools, Scripts
The group decision making processes described in the article may already be defined with the thinkLets design pattern language.
A person could argue against humming for various unspecified reasons.
I'll just CC this here from my notes, which everyone can read here [1]:
“Collaboration Engineering: Foundations and Opportunities” de Vreede (2009) http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol10/iss3/7/
“A Seven-Layer Model of Collaboration: Separation of Concerns for Designers of Collaboration Systems” Briggs (2009) http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2009/26/
Six Patterns of Collaboration “Defining Key Concepts for Collaboration Engineering” Briggs (2006) http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2006/17/
“ThinkLets: Achieving Predictable, Repeatable Patterns of Group Interaction with Group Support Systems (GSS)” http://www.academia.edu/259943/ThinkLets_Achieving_Predictab...
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=thinklets
[1] https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#collab...
4 Years of College, $0 in Debt: How Some Countries Make Education Affordable
It at least makes sense to pay for doctors and nurses to go to school, right? If you want to care for others and you do the work to earn satisfactory grades, I think that investing in your education would have positive ROI.
We had plans here in the US to pay for two years of community college for whoever ("America's College Promise"). IDK what happened to that? We should have called it #ObamaCollege so that everyone could attack corporate welfare and bad investments with no ROI.
New York has the Excelsior scholarship for CUNY and SUNY. Tennessee pays for college with lottery proceeds. Are there other state-level efforts to fund higher education in the US such that students can finish school debt-free or close to it?
There are MOOCs (online courses) which are worth credit hours for the percentage of people that commit to finishing the course. https://www.classcentral.com/
Khan Academy has free SAT, MCAT, NCLEX-RN, GMAT, and LSAT test prep and primary and supplementary learning resources. https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep
Free education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_education
Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?
I'm a software engineer with a diverse background in backend, frontend development.
How do I find jobs related to tackling global warming and climate change in Europe for an English speaker?
Open to ideas and thoughts.
> I'm a software engineer with a diverse background in backend, frontend development.
> How do I find jobs related to tackling global warming and climate change in Europe for an English speaker?
While not directly answering the question, here are some ideas for purchasing, donating, creating new positions, and hiring people that care:
Write more efficient code. Write more efficient compilers. Optimize interpretation and compilation so that the code written by people with domain knowledge who aren't that great at programming who are trying to solve other important problems is more efficient.
Push for PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) that offset energy use. Push for directly sourcing clean energy.
Use services that at least have 100% PPAs for the energy they use: services that run on clean energy sources.
Choose green datacenters.
- [ ] Add the capability for cloud resource schedulers like Kubernetes and Terraform to prefer or require clean energy datacenters.
Choose to work with companies that voluntarily choose to do sustainability reporting.
Work to help develop (and popularize) blockchain solutions that are more energy efficient and that have equal or better security assurances as less efficient chains.
Advocate for clean energy. Donate to NGOs working for our environment and for clean energy.
Invest in clean energy. There are a number of clean energy ETFs, for example. Better energy storage is a good investment.
Push for certified green buildings and datacenters.
- [ ] We should create some sort of a badge and structured data (JSONLD, RDFa, Microdata) for site headers and/or footers that lets consumers know that we're working toward '200% green' so that we can vote with our money.
Do not vote for people who are rolling back regulations that protect our environment. Pay an organization that pays lobbyists to work the system: that's the game.
Help explain why it's both environment-rational and cost-rational to align with national and international environmental sustainability and clean energy objectives.
Argue that we should make external costs internal in order that markets will optimize for what we actually want.
Thermodynamics is part of the physics curriculum for many software engineering and computer science degrees.
There are a number of existing solutions that solve for energy inefficiency due to unreclaimed waste heat.
"Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854
"Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18139654
YC's request for startups: Government 2.0
There's money to be earned in solving for the #GlobalGoals Goals, Targets, and Indicators:
The Global Goals
1. No Poverty
2. Zero Hunger
3. Good Health & Well-Being
4. Quality Education
5. Gender Equality
6. Clean Water & Sanitation
7. Affordable & Clean Energy
8. Decent Work & Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequalities
11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
12. Responsible Consumption & Production
13. Climate Action
14. Life Below Water
15. Life on Land
16. Peace and Justice & Strong Institutions
17. Partnerships for the Goals
Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency
I always wonder what proportion of that group is due to insufficient income, and what proportion is due to terrible financial literacy.
> I always wonder what proportion of that group is due to insufficient income
According to the Social Security Administration [1]:
2017 Average net compensation: 48,251.57
2017 Median net compensation: 31,561.49
The FPL (Federal Poverty Level) income numbers for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) eligibility [2]:
>> $12,140 for individuals, $16,460 for a family of 2, $20,780 for a family of 3, $25,100 for a family of 4, $29,420 for a family of 5, $33,740 for a family of 6, $38,060 for a family of 7, $42,380 for a family of 8
Wages are not keeping up with corporate profits. That can't all be due to automation.
The minimum wage is only one factor linked to price inflation. We can raise wages and still keep inflation down to an ideal range.
Maybe it's that we don't understand what it's like to live on $12K or $32K a year (without healthcare due to lack of Medicaid expansion; due to our collective failure to instill charity as a virtue and getting people back on their feet as a good investment). How could we learn (or remember!) about what it's like to be in this position (without zero-interest bank loans to bail us out)?
> and what proportion is due to terrible financial literacy.
The r/personalfinance wiki is one good resource for personal finance. From [3]:
>> Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
Personal Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more > Personal finance https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...
"CS 007: Personal Finance For Engineers" https://cs007.blog
https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki
... How can we make personal finance a required middle and high school curriculum component? [4]
"What are some ways that you can save money in order to meet or exceed inflation?"
Dave Ramsey's 7 Baby Steps to financial freedom [5] seem like good advice? Is the debt snowball method ideal for minimizing interest payments?
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html
[2] https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-fp...
[3] "Ask HN: How can you save money while living on poverty level?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18894582
[4] "Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894632
Congress should grow the Digital Services budget, it more than pays for itself
> The U.S. Digital Service isn’t perfect, but it is clearly working. The team estimates that for every $1 million invested in USDS that the government will avoid spending $5 million and save thousands of labor hours. Over a five-year period, the team’s efforts will save $1.1 billion, redirect almost 2,000 labor years towards higher value work, and generate over 400 percent return on investment. Most importantly, USDS will continue to deliver better government services for the American people, including Veterans who deserve better.
> In the private sector, these kinds of numbers would not lead to a 50 percent cut in budget. Instead, you’d clearly invest further with that kind of return. Considering the ambitious goals set out in the President’s Management Agenda, the Trump Administration should double down on better support for the public, our troops, and our veterans. The best way to do that is clearly through investments like USDS.
Why would you halve the budget of a team that's yielding a more than 400% ROI (in terms of cost savings)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service
400% ROI to whom?
More data makes hiding corruption harder, so I'm not sure if it really gives 400% to the decision makers.
USDS reports 400% ROI in savings to the taxpayers who fund the government with tax revenue (instead of kicking the can down the road with debt financing) and improvements in customer service quality.
https://www.usaspending.gov (Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Obama, McCain, Carper, Coburn)) has more fine-grained spending data, but not credit-free immutable distributed ledger transaction IDs, quantitative ROI stats, or performance.gov and #globalgoals goal alignment. We'd need a metadata field on spending bills to link to performance.gov and SDG Goals, Targets, and Indicators.
"Transparency and Accountability"
IIRC, here on HN, I've mentioned a number of times -- and quoted in the full from -- the 13 plays of the USDS Digital Services Playbook; all of which are applicable to and should probably be required reading for all government IT and govtech: https://playbook.cio.gov/
There are forms with workflow states that need human review sometimes. USDS helps with getting those processes online in order to reduce costs, increase cost-efficiency, and increase quality of service.
The Trillion-Dollar Annual Interest Payment
> Given the recent actions of Congress, and the years of prior inaction in changing the nation’s fiscal path, the U.S. government’s annual interest payment will eclipse annual defense spending in only six years. By 2025, annual interest costs on the national debt will reach $724 billion, while annual defense spending will reach $706 billion. To put that into perspective, in the 2018 fiscal year, the U.S. government spent $325 billion in interest payments and spent $622 billion in defense (Exhibit 2).
Why would you cut taxes and debt finance our nation's future?
Oak, a Free and Open Certificate Transparency Log
Great use case for blockchain technology
CT logs are already chained
> Great use case for blockchain technology
>> CT logs are already chained
Trillian is a centralized Merkle tree: it doesn't support native replication (AFAIU?) and there is a still a password that can delete or recreate the chain (though we can track for any such inappropriate or errant modifications (due to e.g. solar flares) by manually replicating and verifying every entry in the chain, or trusting that everything before whatever we consider to be a known hash (that could be colliding) is unmodified (since the last time we never verified those entries)).
According to the trillian README, trillian depends upon MySQL/MariaDB and thus internal/private replication is as good as the SQL replication model (which doesn't have a distributed consensus algorithm like e.g. paxos).
A Merkle tree alone is not a blockchain; though it provides more assurance of data integrity than a regular tree, verifying that the whole chain of hashes actually is good and distributed replication without configuring e.g. SSL certs are primary features of blockchains.
There are multiple certificate issuers, multiple logs, and multiple log verifiers. With no single point of failure, that doesn't sound centralized to me?
Which components of the system are we discussing?
PKI is necessarily centralized: certs depend upon CA certs which can depend upon CA certs. If any CA is compromised (e.g. by theft or brute force (which is inestimably infeasible given current ASIC resources' preference for legit income)) that CA can sign any CRL. A CT log and a CT log verifier can help us discover that a redundant and so possibly unauthorized cert has been issued for a given domain listed in an x.509 cert CN/SAN.
The CT log itself - trillian, for Google and now LetsEncrypt, too - though, runs on MySQL; which has one root password.
The system of multiple independent, redundant CT logs is built upon databases that depend upon presumably manually configured replication keys.
Does my browser call a remote log verifier API over (hopefully pinned with a better fingerprint than MD5) HTTPS?
There are multiple issuers, so from an availability point of view, if one is down, you could choose another. They submit to at least two logs, so if one log is unavailable you could read the other one. This is a form of decentralization.
Now, from a security point of view, it only takes breaking into one issuer to issue bad certificates. But maybe classifying everything as either centralized or decentralized is too simple?
Centralized and decentralized are overloaded terms. We could argue that every system that depends upon DNS is a centralized (and thus has a single point of failure).
We could describe replication models as centralized or decentralized. Master/master SQL replication is still not decentralized (regardless of whether there are multiple A records or multiple static IPs configured in the client).
With PKI, we choose the convenience of trusting a CA bundle over having to manually check every cert fingerprint.
Whether a particular chain is centralized or decentralized is often bandied about. When there are a few mining pools that effectively choose which changes are accepted, that's not decentralized either.
That there are multiple redundant independent CT logs is a good thing.
How do I, as a concerned user, securely download (and securely mirror?) one or all of the CT logs and verify that none of the record hashes don't depend upon the previous hash? If the browser relies upon a centralized API for checking hash fingerprints, how is that decentralized?
Looks like there is a bit here about how to get started: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/167366/how-can-...
Most people aren't going to do it, but I think that's not really the point, any more than every user needs to review Linux kernel patches. But I wonder if there are enough "eyes" on this and how would we check?
Death rates from energy production per TWh
Apparently the deaths are justified because energy.
Are the subsidies and taxes (incentives and penalties) rational in light of the relative harms of each form of energy?
"Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending" https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/fossil-f...
> The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion.
> The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution.
IDK whether they've included the costs of responding to requests for help with natural disasters that are more probable due to climate change caused by these "externalties" / "external costs" of fossil fuels.
Energy saves lives so some risk probably is justified.
Why isn't the market choosing the least harmful, least lethal energy sources? Energy is for the most part entirely substitutable: switching costs for consumers like hospitals are basically zero.
(Everyone is free to invest in clean energy at any time)
Switching costs for the entire society are far from zero.
100% Renewable Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
> The main barriers to the widespread implementation of large-scale renewable energy and low-carbon energy strategies are political rather than technological. According to the 2013 Post Carbon Pathways report, which reviewed many international studies, the key roadblocks are: climate change denial, the fossil fuels lobby, political inaction, unsustainable energy consumption, outdated energy infrastructure, and financial constraints.
We need to make the external costs of energy production internal in order to create incentives to prevent these fossil fuel deaths and other costs.
Use links not keys to represent relationships in APIs
A thing may be identified by a URI (/person/123) for which there are zero or more URL routes (/person/123, /v1/person/123). Each additional route complicates caching; redirects are cheap for the server but slower for clients.
JSONLD does define a standard way to indicate that a value is a link: @id (which can be specified in a/an @context) https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/
One additional downside to storing URIs instead of bare references is that it's more complicated to validate a URI template than a simple regex like \d+ or [abcdef\=\d+]+
And on a more fundamental standpoint I get that disk space is cheap theses days. But you just doubled, if not worse, the storage space required for a key for a vague reason.
It may never make any difference on a small dataset, where storage was anyway unaware of differences between integer and text. But it would be hiding in the dark. And maybe in a few year a new recruit will have the outstanding idea to convert text-link to bigint to save some space...
No Python in Red Hat Linux 8?
/usr/bin/python can point to either /usr/bin/python3 or (as PEP 394 currently recommends) /usr/bin/python2
$ alternatives --config python
JMAP: A modern, open email protocol
What are the optimizations in JMAP that make it faster than, say, Solid? Solid is built on a bunch of W3C Web, Security, and Linked Data Standards; LDP: Linked Data Protocol, JSON-LD: JSON Linked Data, WebID-TLS, REST, WebSockets, LDN: Linked Data Notifications. [1][2] Different worlds, I suppose.
There's no reason you couldn't represent RFC5322 data with RDF as JSONLD. There's now a way to do streaming JSON-LD.
LDP does paging and querying.
Solid supports pubsub with WebSockets and LDN. It may or may not (yet?) be as efficient for synchronization as JMAP, but it's definitely designed for all types of objects with linked data web standards; and client APIs can just parse JSON-LD.
[1] https://github.com/solid/information#solid-specifications
[2] https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/issues/123 "WebSockets and HTTP/2" SSE (Server-Side Events)
JMAP: JSON Meta Application Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Meta_Application_Protocol
Is there a OpenAPI Specification for JMAP? There are a bunch of tools for Swagger / OpenAPIs: DRY interactive API docs, server implementations, code generators: https://swagger.io/tools/open-source/ https://openapi.tools/
Does JMAP support labels; such that I don't need to download a message and an attachment and mark it as read twice like labels over IMAP?
How does this integrate with webauthn; is that a different layer?
(edit) Other email things: openpgpjs; Web Key Directory /.well-known/openpgpkey/*; if there's no webserver on the MX domain, you can use the ACME DNS challenge to get free 3-month certs from LetsEncrypt.
I would say your comment, and the first reply, both demonstrate quite effectively why JMAP is probably a better choice for email.
> It may or may not (yet?) be as efficient for synchronization as JMAP, but it's definitely designed for all types of objects
If we hypothetically allow for equal adoption & mindshare of both, and assume both are non-terrible designs, I'd guess the one designed for "all types of objects" is less likely to ever be as efficient as the one designed with a single use-case in mind.
And narrow focus is not only good for optimising specific use-cases, it's also good for adoption as people immediately understand what your protocol is for and how to use it when it has a single purpose and a single source of truth for reference spec, rather than a series of disparate links and vague all-encompassing use-cases.
Solid has brilliant people behind it, but it's too broad, too ambitious, and very much lacks focus, and that will impair adoption because it isn't the "one solution" for anyone's "one problem".
--
To take another perspective on this, there are other commenters in this thread bemoaning the loss of non-HTTP-based protocols. Funnily enough, HTTP itself is a broadly used, broadly useful protocol than can be used for pretty much anything (and had TBL behind it also). The big difference was that Tim wasn't proposing that HTTP be the solution to all our internet problems and needs in 1989—it was just for hypertext documents. It's only now, post-adoption, that it is used for so much more than that.
> If we hypothetically allow for equal adoption & mindshare of both, and assume both are non-terrible designs, I'd guess the one designed for "all types of objects" is less likely to ever be as efficient as the one designed with a single use-case in mind.
This is a generalization that is not supported by any data.
Standards enable competing solutions. Competing solutions often result in performance gains and efficiency.
Hopefully, there will be performant implementations and we won't need to reinvent the wheel in order to synchronize and send notifications for email, contacts, and calendars.
> There's no reason you couldn't represent RFC5322 data with RDF as JSONLD. There's now a way to do streaming JSON-LD.
Is there a reason you'd want to? I clicked all your links but I still have no idea what Solid is.
To eliminate the need for domain-specific parser implementations on both server and client, make it easy to index and search this structured data, and to link things with URIs and URLs like other web applications that also make lots of copies.
Solid is a platform for decentralized linked data storage and retrieval with access controls, notifications, WebID + OAuth/OpenID. The Wikipedia link and spec documents have a more complete description that could be retrieved and stored locally.
Grid Optimization Competition
From "California grid data is live – solar developers take note" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18855820 :
>> It looks like California is at least two generations of technology ahead of other states. Let’s hope the rest of us catch up, so that we have a grid that can make an asset out of every building, every battery, and every solar system.
> +1. Are there any other states with similar grid data available for optimization; or any plans to require or voluntarily offer such a useful capability?
How do these competitions and the live actual data from California-only (so far; AFAIU) compare?
Are there standards for this grid data yet? Without standards, how generalizable are the competition solutions to real-world data?
Blockchain's present opportunity: data interchange standardization
What are the current standards efforts for blockchain data interchange?
W3C JSON-LD, ld-signatures + lds-merkleproof2017 (normalize the data before signing it so that the signature is representation-independent (JSONLD, RDFa, RDF, n-triples)), W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers, W3C Verifiable Claims, Blockcerts.org
W3C Credentials Community Group: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/community/work_items.html#draft-sp... (DID, Multihash (IETF), [...])
"Blockchain Credential Resources; a gist" https://gist.github.com/westurner/4345987bb29fca700f52163c33...
Specifically for payments:
https://www.w3.org/TR/?title=payment (the W3C Payment Request API standardizes browser UI payment/checkout workflows)
ILP: Interledger Protocol https://interledger.org/rfcs/0027-interledger-protocol-4/
> W3C JSON-LD
https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/ (JSON-LD 1.0)
https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/ (JSON-LD 1.1)
> ld-signatures + lds-merkleproof2017 (normalize the data before signing it so that the signature is representation-independent (JSONLD, RDFa, RDF, n-triples))
https://w3c-dvcg.github.io/ld-signatures/
https://w3c-dvcg.github.io/lds-merkleproof2017/ (2017 Merkle Proof Linked Data Signature Suite)
> W3C DID Decentralized Identifiers
https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-primer/
>> A Decentralized Identifier (DID) is a new type of identifier that is globally unique, resolveable with high availability, and cryptographically verifiable. DIDs are typically associated with cryptographic material, such as public keys, and service endpoints, for establishing secure communication channels. DIDs are useful for any application that benefits from self-administered, cryptographically verifiable identifiers such as personal identifiers, organizational identifiers, and identifiers for Internet of Things scenarios. For example, current commercial deployments of W3C Verifiable Credentials heavily utilize Decentralized Identifiers to identify people, organizations, and things and to achieve a number of security and privacy-protecting guarantees.
> W3C Verifiable Claims
https://github.com/w3c/verifiable-claims
https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/ (Data Model)
https://w3c.github.io/vc-use-cases/ (Use Cases: Education, Healthcare, Professional Credentials, Legal Identity,)
Ask HN: Value of “Shares of Stock options” when joining a startup
I got an offer from a US start-up (well +25 employees) which has an office in EU where I would join them.
The offer's base salary is good (ie. higher than average for senior positions for that location) but I intend to negotiate it further, as I have possible other options. patio11's negotiation guide was a great read in that regard.
However, I'm relocating from a non-EU/US country, and I don't have a single idea about the financial systems, stock markets, and how to evaluate "15k shares of stock-options" or what "Stock Option and Grant Plan" means, I'm asking you fellow HNers about this part.
Do I just treat them as worthless and focus on base salary (as some internet sources suggest) or is there a formula to evaluate what they would be worth in say 2 years for instance ?
There are a number of options/equity calculators:
https://tldroptions.io/ ("~65% of companies will never exit", "~15% of companies will have low exits*", "~20% of companies will make you money")
https://comp.data.frontapp.com/ "Compensation and Equity Calculator"
http://optionsworth.com/ "What are my options worth?"
http://foundrs.com/ "Co-Founder Equity Calculator"
CMU Computer Systems: Self-Grading Lab Assignments (2018)
These look fun; in particular the "Attack Lab".
Dockerfiles might be helpful and easy to keep updated. Alpine Linux or just busybox are probably sufficient?
The instructor set could extend FROM the assignment image and run a few tests with e.g. testinfra (pytest)
You can also test code written in C with gtest.
I haven't read through all of the materials: are there suggested (automated) fuzzing tools? Does OSS-Fuzz solve?
Are there references to CWE and/or the SEI CERT C Coding Standard rules? https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...
"How could we have changed our development process to catch these bugs/vulns before release?"
"If we have 100% [...] test coverage, would that mean we've prevented these vulns?"
What about 200%?
What on earth would 200% test coverage mean?
Coverage for all the code that was written, and all the code that has yet to be typed, of course.
All thanks to quantum computing :)
Show HN: Debugging-Friendly Tracebacks for Python
pytest also has helpful tracebacks; though only for test runs.
With nose-progressive, you can specify --progressive-editor or update the .noserc so that traceback filepaths are prefixed with your preferred editor command.
vim-unstack parses paths from stack traces / tracebacks (for a number of languages including Python) and opens each in a split at that line number. https://github.com/mattboehm/vim-unstack
Here's the Python regex from my hackish pytb2paths.sh script:
'\s+File "(?P<file>.*)", line (?P<lineno>\d+), in (?P<modulestr>.*)$'
Why isn't 1 a prime number?
Funny true story about this: One time a man came up to me and handed me his phone, and asked me to call his mom. He was about to pass out and he asked me not call an ambulance (God bless America) , he appeared to have a concussion. By this time there was about 10-15 people around him and he could barely talk. I asked him what his phone code was and instead of just giving it to me he said "it's the first four prime numbers". Immediately, about five people shout "1,2,3,5". I am no longer holding the phone, because I handed to someone else to make sure it was okay. Sure enough, I was in a mathematical proofs class and we had just discussed this topic. So, I say "one is not a prime number". Of course, we get the phone unlocked in the second try with "2,3,5,7" and the guys mom is on the way. Everyone thought I was a genius a hero.
You can also dial emergency contacts without unlocking the phone. They are accessible from the medical ID page on iOS, I assume Android has similar.
> You can also dial emergency contacts without unlocking the phone. They are accessible from the medical ID page on iOS, I assume Android has similar.
You can set a Lock Screen Message by searching for "Lock Screen Message" in the Android Settings.
You can also create an "ICE (In Case of Emergency)" contact.
How do we know when we’ve fallen in love? (2016)
Where is the feeling felt? Is there an associated color or a shape or a kinesiologic position?
"Love styles" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_styles
"Greek words for love" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love
Rare and strange ICD-10 codes
These are too funny: https://www.empr.com/home/features/the-strangest-and-most-ob...
Choice selection:
V91.07X - Burn Due to Water Skis on Fire(?!)
W61.42XA. Struck By Turkey, initial encounter. If a duck is involved, there's a code for that too. (W61.62X)
R46.1. Bizarre Personal Appearance.
My favorite: T63.012D: Toxic effect of rattlesnake venom, intentional self-harm, subsequent encounter
So basically you have a case where someone not only intentionally wanted to harm themselves with rattlesnake venom once, but at least twice!
> So basically you have a case where someone not only intentionally wanted to harm themselves with rattlesnake venom once, but at least twice!
No, you misunderstand the terminology. "Subsequent encounter" means with the doctor not with the rattlesnake. AKA followup care during or after recovery.
> No, you misunderstand the terminology. "Subsequent encounter" means with the doctor not with the rattlesnake
You can reference ICD codes with the schema.org/code property of schema.org/MedicalEntity and subclasses. https://schema.org/docs/meddocs.html
"Subsequent encounter" is poorly defined. IMHO, there should be a code for this.
> "Subsequent encounter" is poorly defined.
"Poorly defined" is poorly defined. Explanations of when to use the D make perfect sense to me.
"The 7th character for “subsequent encounter” is to be used for all encounters after the patient has received active treatment of the condition and is receiving routine care for the condition during the healing or recovery phase. Examples of subsequent encounters include cast change or removal, x-ray to check healing status of a fracture, removal of external or internal fixation device, medication adjustments, and other aftercare and follow-up visits following active treatment of the injury or condition. Encounters for rehabilitation, such as physical and occupational therapy, are another example of the use of the “subsequent encounter” 7th character. For aftercare following an injury, the acute injury code should be assigned with the 7th character for subsequent encounter."
This parses the ICD 10 CM with lxml: https://github.com/westurner/pycd10api/blob/master/pycd10api...
Python Requests III
So what's the difference to the predecessor?
asyncio, HTTP/2, connection pooling, timeouts, Python 3.6+
README > "Feature Support" https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests3/blob/master/README...
https://github.com/aio-libs/aiohttp already supports asyncio. Why do I need this for asyncio?
Anyway, I see that Issues are disabled for the repo. Is that the new way to develop? /s
Tools built with aiohttp: https://libraries.io/pypi/aiohttp/usage
Tools built with requests: https://libraries.io/pypi/requests/usage
Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist
My former roommate is a pilot. When I first met him, I noticed that he uses checklists for just about everything, even the most basic everyday tasks.
After some time, I decided to apply that same mentality to my own life. Both in private and work situations.
I get it now. Checklists reduce cognitive load tremendously well, even for basic tasks. As an example: I have a checklist for when I need to travel, it contains stuff like what to pack, asking someone to feed my cat, check windows are closed, dishwasher empty, heating turned down, etc. Before the checklist, I would always be worried I forgot something, now I can relax.
Also, checklists are a great way to improve processes. Basically a way to debug your life. For instance: I once forgot to empty the trash bin before a long trip, I added that to my checklist and haven't had a smelly surprise ever since ;)
This is described in the book called "the checklist manifesto". Very good book by the way.
https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/...
The medical community uses checklists. They've been using checklists for a while. A number of studies found that they only help for a few months, while they're new.
That said, "the medical community" is not a homogeneous monolith, and you can absolutely find regional variation in what checklists are used for, how detailed they are, how closely they're followed, how people are accountable for keeping to them, etc.
"The Checklist Manifesto" chose to overlook the studies about how transient the benefit of checklists is.
Are these paper based? Any checklist apps out there for our daily use?
GitHub and GitLab support task checklists in Markdown and also project boards which add and remove labels like 'ready' and 'in progress' when cards are moved between board columns; like kanban:
- [ ] not complete
- [x] completed
Other tools support additional per-task workflow states:
- [o] open
- [x (2019-04-17)] completed on date
I worked on a large hospital internal software project where the task was to build a system for reusable checklists editable through the web that prints them out in duplicate or triplicate at nearby printers. People really liked having the tangible paper copy.
"The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande was published while I worked there. TIL pilots have been using checklists for process control in order to reduce error for many years.
Evernote, RememberTheMilk, Google Tasks, and Google Keep all support checklists. Asana and Gitea and TaskWarrior support task dependencies.
A person could carry around a Hipster PDA with Bullet Journal style tasks lists with checkboxes; printed from a GTD service with an API and a @media print CSS stylesheet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA
I'm not aware of very many tools that support authoring reusable checklists with structured data elements and data validation.
...
There are a number of configuration management systems like Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible that build a graph of completable and verifiable tasks and then depth-first traverse said graph (either with hash randomization resulting in sometimes different traversals or with source order as an implicit ordering)
Resource scheduling systems like operating systems and conference room schedulers can take ~task priority into account when optimally ordering tasks given available resources; like triage.
Scheduling algorithms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15267146
TodoMVC catalogs Todo list implementations with very many MV* JS Frameworks: http://todomvc.com
Reusable Checklists could be done with a simple text document that you duplicate every time you need it no ?
For sure. Though many tools don't read .txt (or .md/.markdown) files.
GitHub and GitLab support (multiple) Issue and Pull Request templates:
Default: /.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md || Configure in web interface
/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/Name.md || /.gitlab/issue_templates/Name.md
Default: /.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md || Configure in web interface
/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/Name.md || /.gitlab/merge_request_templates/Name.md
There are template templates in awesome-github-templates [1] and checklist template templates in github-issue-templates [2].
I really want slack to adopt these as well...
I'll often be on call with customer and create a checklist on MacOS Notes on the fly. Then will copy paste that in slack or github for simple tracking.
Mattermost supports threaded replies and Markdown with checklist checkboxes
You can post GitHub/GitLab project updates to a Slack/Mattermost channel with webhooks (and search for and display GH/GL issues with /slash commands); though issue edits and checkbox state changes aren't (yet?) included in the events that channels receive.
Apply to Y Combinator
The next Startup School course begins in July: https://www.startupschool.org/
> Learn how to start a startup with YC’s free 10-week online course.
> Here is a list of the top 100 Y Combinator companies by valuation (why valuation?), as of October 2018. We also included YC’s top 12 exits.
Here's the list of the 1,900 Y Combinator companies through Winter 2019 (W19) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/
"Startup Playbook" by Sam Altman (YC Founder) and Illustrated by Gregory Koberger is also a good read: https://playbook.samaltman.com/
Trunk-Based Development vs. Git Flow
One major advantage of the gitflow/hubflow git workflows is that there is a standard way of merging across branches. For example, a 'hotfix' branch is merged into the stable master branch and also develop with one standard command; there's no need to re-explain and train new devs on how the branches were supposed to work here. I even copied the diagram(s) into my notes: https://westurner.github.io/tools/#hubflow
IMHO, `git log` on the stable master branch containing each and every tagged release is preferable to having multiple open release branches.
Requiring tests to pass before a PR gets merged is a good policy that's independent of the trunk or gitflow workflow decision.
Ask HN: Anyone else write the commit message before they start coding?
I feel like I just learned how to use Git: writing the message first thing has made me a lot more productive. I'm wondering if anyone else does this; I know test driven development is a thing, where people write tests before code, and this seems like a logical extension.
Ask HN: Datalog as the only language for web programming, logic and database
Can Datalog be used as the only language which we can use for writing server-side web application, complex domain business logic and database querying?
Are there any efforts made in this direction.
To quote myself from a post the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407170 :
> PyDatalog does Datalog (which is ~Prolog, but similar and very capable) logic programming with SQLAlchemy (and database indexes) and apparently NoSQL support. https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/
> Datalog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog
> ... TBH, IDK about logic programming and bad facts. Resilience to incorrect and incredible information is - I suppose - a desirable feature of any learning system that reevaluates its learnings as additional and contradictory information makes its way into the datastores.
I'm not sure that Datalog is really necessary for most CRUD operations; SQLAlchemy and the SQLAlchemy ORM are generally sufficient for standard database querying CRUD.
The cortex is a neural network of neural networks
Is there a program like codeacademy but for learning sysadmin?
if not, anyone wanna build one?
A few sysadmin and devops curriculum resources; though none but Beaker and Molecule are interactive with any sort of testing AFAIU:
"System Administrator" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator
"Software Configuration Management" (SCM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_configuration_managem...
"DevOps" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
"OpsSchool Curriculum" http://www.opsschool.org
- Soft Skills 101, 201
- Labs Exercises
- Free. Contribute
awesome-sysadmin > configuration-management https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin/blob/master/README...
- This could list reusable module collections such as Puppet Forge and Ansible Galaxy;
- And module testing tools like Puppet Beaker and Ansible Molecule (that can use Vagrant or Docker to test a [set of] machines)
https://github.com/stack72/ops-books
- I'd add "Time Management for System Administrators" (2005)
https://landing.google.com/sre/books/
- There's now a "Site Reliability Workbook" to go along with the Google SRE book. Both are free online.
https://response.pagerduty.com
- The PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation is also free online.
- OpsGenie has a free plan also with incident response alerting and on-call management.
There are a number of awesome-devops lists.
Minikube and microk8s package Kubernetes into a nice bundle of distributed systems components that'll run on Lin, Mac, Win. You can convert docker-compose.yml configs to Kubernetes pods when you decide that it should've been HA with a load balancer SPOF and x.509 certs and a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) from the start!
Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes
The argument that Kubernetes adds complexity is, in my opinion, bogus. Kubernetes is a "define once, forget about it" type of infrastructure. You define the state you want your infrastructure to and Kubernetes takes care of maintaining that state. Tools like Ansible and Puppet, as great as they are, do not guarantee your infrastructure will end up in the state you defined and you easily end up with broken services. The only complexity in kubernetes is the fact that it forces you to think and carefully design your infra in a way people aren't used to, yet. More upfront, careful thinking isn't complexity. It can only benefit you in the long run.
There is, however, a learning curve to Kubernetes, but it isn't this sharp. It does require you to sit down and read the doc for 8 hours, but that a small price to pay.
A few month back I wrote a blog post[1] that, through walking through the few different infrastructures my company experimented with over the years, surfaces many reasons one would want to use [a managed] Kubernetes. (For a shorter read, you can probably start at reading at [2])
[1]: https://boxunix.com/post/bare_metal_to_kube
[2]: https://boxunix.com/post/bare_metal_to_kube/#_hardware_infra...
It's pretty common for new technologies to advertise themselves as "adopt, and forget about it", but in my experience it's unheard of that any actually deliver on this promise.
Any technology you adopt today is a technology you're going to have to troubleshoot tomorrow. (I don't think the 15,000 Kubernetes questions on StackOverflow are all from initial setup.) I can't remember the last [application / service / file format / website / language / anything related to computer software] that was so simple and reliable that I wasn't searching the internet for answers (and banging my head against the wall because of) the very next month. It was probably something on my C=64.
As Kernighan said back in the 1970's, "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" I've never used Kubernetes, but I've read some articles about it and watched some videos, and despite the nonstop bragging about its simplicity (red flag #1), I'm not sure I can figure out how to deploy with it. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have any hope of fixing it when it breaks next month.
Hearing testimonials only from people who say "it doesn't break!" is red flag #2. No technology works perfectly for everyone, so I want to hear from the people who had to troubleshoot it, not the people who think it's all sunshine and rainbows. And those people are not kind, and make it sound like the cost is way more than just "8 hours reading the docs" -- in fact, the docs are often called out as part of the problem.
> As Kernighan said back in the 1970's, "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
What a great quote. Thanks
Some more quotes taken from http://typicalprogrammer.com/what-does-code-readability-mean that you might find interesting.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. – Martin Fowler
Just because people tell you it can’t be done, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be done. It just means that they can’t do it. – Anders Hejlsberg
The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do. – John Holt
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. – Brian W. Kernighan
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user. – C.A.R. Hoare
No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first. – Andy Hunt
> Tools like Ansible and Puppet, as great as they are, do not guarantee your infrastructure will end up in the state you defined and you easily end up with broken services.
False dilemma. Ansible and Puppet are great tools for configuring kubernetes, kubernetes worker nodes, and building container images.
Kubernetes does not solve for host OS maintenance; though there are a number of host OS projects which remove most of what they consider to be unnecessary services, there's still need to upgrade kubernetes nodes and move pods out of the way first (which can be done with e.g. Puppet or Ansible).
As well, it may not be appropriate for monitoring to depend upon kubernetes; there again you have nodes to manage with an SCM tool.
Quantum Machine Appears to Defy Universe’s Push for Disorder
Maybe an example or related to time crystals?
"Scar (physics)": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scar_(physics)
> Scars are unexpected in the sense that stationary classical distributions at the same energy are completely uniform in space with no special concentrations along periodic orbits, and quantum chaos theory of energy spectra gave no hint of their existence
Pytype checks and infers types for your Python code
How does pytype compare with the PyAnnotate [1] and MonkeyType [2] dynamic / runtime PEP-484 type annotation type inference tools?
How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim
As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow along the logic.
There is absolutely no dearth of study material on the internet. It's one thing to take notes as part of your study process. There it helps solidify your understanding. But surely taking notes on the fly when you have been barely introduced to the subject isn't going to help with that.
> mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content
The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding hypothesis" [1].
There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand. This is why many universities prefer (or even require) notes to be taken by hand, and disallow laptops in class.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361476X78...
2: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...
> The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding hypothesis" [1].
There's almost certainly an advantage to learning to think about math using a publishable symbol set like LaTeX.
We learn by reinforcement; with feedback loops that may take until weeks later in a typical university course.
> There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand.
Handwriting notes is impractical for some people due to e.g. injury and illegibility.
The linked study regarding retention and handwritten versus typed notes has been debunked with references that are referenced elsewhere in comments on this post. There have been a few studies with insufficient controls (lack of randomization, for one) which have been widely repeated by educators who want to be given attention.
Doodling has been shown to increase information retention. Maybe doodling as a control really would be appropriate.
Banning laptops from lectures is not respectful of students with injury and illegible handwriting. Asking people to put their phones on silent (so they can still make and take emergency calls) and refrain from distracting other students with irrelevant content on their computers is reasonable and considerate.
(What a cool approach to math note-taking. I feel a bit inferior because I haven't committed to learning that valuable, helpful skill and so that's stupid and you're just wasting your time because that's not even necessary when all you need to do is retain the information you've paid for for the next few months at most. If course, once you get on the job, you'll never always be using that tool and e.g. latex2sympy to actually apply that theory to solving a problem that people are willing to pay for. So, thanks for the tips and kudos, idiot)
LHCb discovers matter-antimatter asymmetry in charm quarks
So, does this disprove all of supersymmetry? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry
No, supersymmetry and charge-parity symmetry are different.
Ah, thanks.
"CPT Symmetry" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPT_symmetry
"CP Violations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
"Charm quark" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charm_quark :
> The antiparticle of the charm quark is the charm antiquark (sometimes called anticharm quark or simply anticharm), which differs from it only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.
React Router v5
Using react router on one of my personal projects (~ 30k loc) was probably one of my largest regrets. At every turn it seemed designed to do the thing I wouldn’t expect, or have arbitrary restrictions that made my life tougher.
Some examples:
* there's no relative routes https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/issues/2172
* there's no way to refresh the page https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/issues/1982 ("that's your responsibility, not ours")
* The scroll position will stick when you navigate to a new route, causing you to need to create a custom component wrapper to manage scrolling https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/issues/3950
* React router's <link> do not allow you to link outside of the current site https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/issues/1147 so you have to make an in those cases. This doesn’t sound bad, but it’s particularly frustrating when dealing with dynamic or user generated content. Why can’t they handle this simple case?
> there's no relative routes
> React router's <link> do not allow you to link outside of the current site
Both valid points. Not show stoppers though. And not enough to make me regret using the library. The solution to the external links issue is a one-liner.
> there's no way to refresh the page https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/issues/1982 ("that's your responsibility, not ours")
That is your responsibility. Why do you need the routing library to handle page refreshing for you?
> the scroll position will stick when you navigate to a new route
Making the page scroll to the top when navigating to a new page is trivial. I would 100% rather have this problem instead of the opposite: scroll jumping to the top when I don't want it to. That's so much harder to fix.
> Navigating to the same page would not actually reload the page, it would just trigger a componentDidMount() on all components in the page again, which led me to have a lot of bugs when I did some initialization in my constructor
That's exactly what it's supposed to do. It's a client side routing solution. (I'm also pretty sure that it doesn't remount)
From the issues that you've had with the library, it seems like client side routing is not actually what you're looking for. If you regret using it so much, may I ask what the alternative would be?
IMO a project either needs client side routing, or it doesn't. If it does, then React Router is the obvious choice. Otherwise, of course, don't use it and save yourself from unnecessary complexity.
> The solution to the external links issue is a one-liner.
It is most definitely not a one-liner.
> Making the page scroll to the top when navigating to a new page is trivial.
So do it for me. There’s no reason a routing library should break default behavior.
> That's exactly what it's supposed to do. It's a client side routing solution. (I'm also pretty sure that it doesn't remount)
Then it’s “supposed” to have inconsistent behavior. Navigating anywhere else in my site will call constructors to all my components. Navigating to the same page won’t.
> From the issues that you've had with the library, it seems like client side routing is not actually what you're looking for.
My site was a music site. I wanted clientside routing so I could keep music playing while you navigated between links. Seemed like a slam dunk for clientside routing to me.
> may I ask what the alternative would be?
Quite honestly I would go onto GitHub and look for any routing solution that didn’t have multiple closed unfixed issues with hundreds of thumbs up.
> So do it for me.
I think this will work:
Put this wherever you put your reusable functions:
`const scrollToTop = () => document.getElementById('root').scrollIntoView();`
And put this in the components / functions you want the scrollToTop effect to work on:
`useEffect(() => { scrollToTop() }, []);`
And put this in your CSS:
`html { scroll-behavior: smooth }`
(Edit to add: Not saying React Router is something you should / shouldn’t use. Just wanted to share that code in case it helps unblock anyone.)
Accidentally downvoted on mobile (and upvoted two others). Thanks for this.
"Scroll Restoration" https://reacttraining.com/react-router/web/guides/scroll-res...
Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world
Objective truth!? A question for epistemologists to decide.
How could they record their high entropy (?) solipsistic observations in an immutable datastore in such as way as to have probably zero knowledge of the other party's observations?
Anyways, that's why I only read the title and the abstract.
Wigner's friend experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
Show HN: A simple Prolog Interpreter written in a few lines of Python 3
Cool tests! PyDatalog does Datalog (which is ~Prolog, but similar and very capable) logic programming with SQLAlchemy (and database indexes) and apparently NoSQL support. https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/
Datalog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog
... TBH, IDK about logic programming and bad facts. Resilience to incorrect and incredible information is - I suppose - a desirable feature of any learning system that reevaluates its learnings as additional and contradictory information makes its way into the datastores.
Thanks for the feedback :) I'll definitely check out Datalog - I didn't realize they had logic programming integrated with SQLAlchemy, so it definitely sounds interesting!
How to earn your macroeconomics and finance white belt as a software developer
Thanks for the wealth of resources in this post. Here are a few more:
"Python for Finance: Analyze Big Financial Data" (2014, 2018) https://g.co/kgs/qkY8J6 ... https://pyalgo.tpq.io also includes the "Finance with Python" course and this book as a PDF and Jupyter notebooks.
Quantopian put out a call for the best Value Investing algos (implemented in quantopian/zipline) awhile back. This post links to those and other value investing resources: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19181453 (Ctrl-F "econo")
"Lectures in Quantitative Economics as Python and Julia Notebooks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083479 links to these excellent lectures and a number of tools for working with actual data from FRED, ECB, Eurostat, ILO, IMF, OECD, UNSD, UNESCO, World Bank, Quandl.
One thing that many finance majors, courses, and resources often fail to identify is the role that startup and small businesses play in economic growth and actual value creation: jobs, GDP, return on direct capital investment. Most do not succeed, but it is possible to do better than index funds and have far more impact in terms of sustainable investment than as an owner of a nearly-sure-bet index fund that owns some shares and takes a hands-off approach to business management, research, product development, and operations.
Is it possible to possess a comprehensive understanding of finance and economics but still not have personal finance down? Personal finance: r/personalfinance/wiki, "Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17894632
Ask HN: Relationship between set theory and category theory
I have an idea about the relationship between set theory and category theory and I would like some feedback. I would like others to see it too, and I don't know how to do it. I think it's at least interesting to look at as a slightly crazy collage, but I was a bit more excited than normal when the idea hit, so I just had to dump it all at once in this image: https://twitter.com/FamilialRhino/status/1101777965724168193 (You will have to zoom the picture in order to be able to read the scribbles.)
It has to do with resonance in the energy flowing in emergent networks. Can't quite put my finger on it, so I'll be here to answer any questions.
Thanks for reading.
"Categorical set theory" > "References" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_set_theory#Referen...
From "Homotopy category" > "Concrete categories" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homotopy_category#Concrete_cat... :
> While the objects of a homotopy category are sets (with additional structure), the morphisms are not actual functions between them, but rather a classes of functions (in the naive homotopy category) or "zigzags" of functions (in the homotopy category). Indeed, Freyd showed that neither the naive homotopy category of pointed spaces nor the homotopy category of pointed spaces is a concrete category. That is, there is no faithful functor from these categories to the category of sets.
My "understanding" of category theory is extremely shallow, but that's exactly why I think my proposal makes sense. It is the kind of thing that everybody ignores for decades precisely because it's transparently obvious, like a fish that doesn't understand water.
Here is the statement:
The meaning of no category is every category.
reference: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/the-blue-eyed-isla...
This was already understood by everybody in the field, no doubt. It's just that somebody has to actually say it to someone else in order for the symmetry to break. The link above has the exact description of this, from Terence Tao.
The most popular docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities
Although vulnerability scanners can be a useful tool, I find it very troublesome that you can utter the sentence "this package contains XX vulnerabilities, and that package contains YY vulnerabilities" and then stop talking. You've provided barely any useful information!
The quantity of vulnerabilities in an image is not really all that useful information. A large amount of vulnerabilities in a Docker image does not necessarily imply that there's anything insecure going on. Many people don't realize that a vulnerability is usually defined as "has a CVE security advisory", and that CVEs get assigned based on a worst-case evaluation of the bug. As a result, having a CVE in your container barely tells you anything about your actual vulnerability position. In fact, most of the time you will find that having a CVE in some random utility doesn't matter. Most CVEs in system packages don't apply to most of your containers' threat models.
Why not? Because an attacker is very unlikely to be able to use vulnerabilities in these system libraries or utilities. Those utilities are usually not in active use in the first place. Even if they are used, you are not usually in a position to exploit these vulnerabilities as an attacker.
Just as an example, a hypothetical outdated version of grep in one of these containers can hypothetically contain many CVEs. But if your Docker service doesn't use grep, then you would need to manually run grep to be vulnerable. And an attacker that is able to run grep in your Docker container has already owned you - it doesn't make a difference that your grep is vulnerable! This hypothetical vulnerable version of grep therefore makes no difference in the security of your container, despite containing many CVEs.
It's the quality of these vulnerabilities that matters. Can an attacker actually exploit the vulnerabilities to do bad things? The answer for almost all of these CVEs is "no". But that's not really the product that Snyk sells - Snyk sells a product to show you as many vulnerabilities as possible. Any vulnerability scanner company thinks it can provide most business value (and make the most money) by reporting as many vulnerabilities as it can. For sure it can help you to pinpoint those few vulnerabilities that are exploitable, but that's where your own analysis comes in.
I'm not saying there's not a lot to improve in terms of container security. There's a whole bunch to improve there. But focusing on quantities like "amount of CVEs in an image" is not the solution - it's marketing.
This entire depending on a base container for setup and then essentially throwing away everything you get from the package manager is part of the issue. There is no real package management for Docker. Hell, there isn't even an official way to determine if your image needs an upgrade (I wrote a ruby script that gets the latest tags from a docker repo, extracts the ones with numbers and sorts them in order and compares them to what I have running).
Relying on an Alpine/Debian/Ubuntu base helps to get dependencies installed quickly. Docker could have just created their own base distro and some mechanism to track package updates across images, but they did not.
There are guides for making bare containers, they contain nothing .. no ip, grep, bash .. only the bare minimum libraries and requirements to run your service. They are minimal, but incredibly difficult to debug (sysdig still sucks unless you shell out money for enterprise).
I feel like containers are alright, but Docker is a partial dumpster fire. cgroup isolation is good, the crazy way we deal with packages in container systems is not so good.
Sure if you're just checking for base-distro packages for security vulnerabilities, you're going to find security issues that don't apply (e.g. an exploit in libpng even though your container runs nothing that even links to libpng), but it does excuse the whole issue with the way containers are constructed.
I think this space is really open too, for people to find better systems that are also portable: image formats that are easy to build, easy to maintain dependencies for, and easy to run as FreeBSD jails OR Linux cgroup managed containers (Docker for FreeBSD translated images to jails, but it's been unmaintained for years).
I agree the tooling is a tire fire :(
> e.g. an exploit in libpng even though your container runs nothing that even links to libpng
it's a problem because some services or api's could be abused giving the attacker a path to these vulnerable resources and then use that vulnerability regardless if it is used currently by your service.
I like my images to only contain what's absolutely needed to do that job only. It's not so difficult to do, provided people would be willing to architect systems from the ground up, instead of pulling in a complete debian or fedora installation and then removing things (that should be outlawed imho lol). Not only do I get less attack surface but also smaller updates (which again then is incentive to do more often), less complexity, less logs, easier auditabile (now every log file or even log line might give valid clues), faster incident response, easier troubleshooting, sorry for going on and on ...
It's a cultural problem too: where people working in an environment where it's normal to have every command available on a production system (really?), and where there is no barrier to install anything new that is "required" without discussion & peer review (what are we pair programming for?) or where nobody even tracks the dead weight in production or whether configs are locked down?.
I sometimes think many companies lost control over this long ago. [citation needed] :(
I'm not familiar with Docker infrastructure but what is the alternative to "pulling in a complete debian or fedora installation and then removing things"? Compiling your own kernel and doing the whole "Linux From Scratch" thing? Isn't that incredibly time-intensive to do for every single container?
Just have an image with very a minimal user land. Compiling your own kernel is irrelevant because you need the host kernel to run the container, and container images don't contain a kernel.
The busybox image is a good starting point. Take that, then copy your executables and libraries. If you are willing to go further, you can rather easily compile your own busybox with most utilities stripped out. It's not time intensive because you need to do it just once, and it takes just an afternoon to figure out how.
I don't think this is a tooling problem at all.
"The tooling makes it too easy to do it wrong." Compared to shell scripts with package manager invocations? Nobody configures a system with just packages: there are always scripts to call, chroots to create, users and groups to create, passwords to set, firewall policies to update, etc.
There are a bunch of ways to create LXC containers: shell scripts, Docker, ansible. Shell scripts preceded Docker: you can write a function to stop, create an intermediate tarball, and then proceed (so that you don't have to run e.g. debootstrap without a mirror every time you manually test your system build script; so that you can cache build steps that completed successfully).
With Docker images, the correct thing to do is to extend FROM the image you want to use, build the whole thing yourself, and then tag and store your image in a container repository. Neither should you rely upon months-old liveCD images.
"You should just build containers on busybox." So, no package management? A whole ensemble of custom builds to manually maintain (with no AppArmor or SELinux labels)? Maintainers may prefer for distros to field bug reports for their own common build configurations and known-good package sets. Please don't run as root in a container ("because it's only a container that'll get restarted someday"). Busybox is not a sufficient OS distribution.
It's not the tools, it's how people are choosing to use them. They can, could, and should try and use idempotent package management tasks within their container build scripts; but they don't and that's not Bash/Ash/POSIX's fault either.
> With Docker images, the correct thing to do is to extend FROM the image you want to use, build the whole thing yourself, and then tag and store your image in a container repository. Neither should you rely upon months-old liveCD images.
This should rebuild all. There should be an e.g. `apt-get upgrade -y && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists` in there somewhere (because base images are usually not totally current (and neither are install ISOs)).
`docker build --no-cache --pull`
You should check that each Dockerfile extends FROM `tag:latest` or the latest version of the tag that you support. Its' not magical, you do have to work it.
Also, IMHO, Docker SHOULD NOT create another Linux distribution.
Tinycoin: A small, horrible cryptocurrency in Python for educational purposes
The 'dumbcoin' jupyter notebook is also a good reference: "Dumbcoin - An educational python implementation of a bitcoin-like blockchain" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/julienr/ipynb_playground...
When does the concept of equilibrium work in economics?
"Modeling stock return distributions with a quantum harmonic oscillator" (2018) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/120/380...
> We propose a quantum harmonic oscillator as a model for the market force which draws a stock return from short-run fluctuations to the long-run equilibrium. The stochastic equation governing our model is transformed into a Schrödinger equation, the solution of which features "quantized" eigenfunctions. Consequently, stock returns follow a mixed χ distribution, which describes Gaussian and non-Gaussian features. Analyzing the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) All Share Index, we demonstrate that our model outperforms traditional stochastic process models, e.g., the geometric Brownian motion and the Heston model, with smaller fitting errors and better goodness-of-fit statistics. In addition, making use of analogy, we provide an economic rationale of the physics concepts such as the eigenstate, eigenenergy, and angular frequency, which sheds light on the relationship between finance and econophysics literature.
"Quantum harmonic oscillator" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_harmonic_oscillator
The QuantEcon lectures have a few different multiple agent models:
"Rational Expectations Equilibrium" https://lectures.quantecon.org/py/rational_expectations.html
"Markov Perfect Equilibrium" https://lectures.quantecon.org/py/markov_perf.html
"Robust Markov Perfect Equilibrium" https://lectures.quantecon.org/py/rob_markov_perf.html
"Competitive Equilibria of Chang Model" https://lectures.quantecon.org/py/chang_ramsey.html
... "Lectures in Quantitative Economics as Python and Julia Notebooks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19083479 (data sources (pandas-datareader, pandaSDMX), tools, latex2sympy)
"Econophysics" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econophysics
> Indeed, as shown by Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, general equilibrium theory in economics is based on the physical concept of mechanical equilibrium.
Simdjson – Parsing Gigabytes of JSON per Second
> Requirements: […] A processor with AVX2 (i.e., Intel processors starting with the Haswell microarchitecture released 2013, and processors from AMD starting with the Rizen)
Also noteworthy that on Intel at least, using AVX/AVX2 reduces the frequency of the CPU for a while. It can even go below base clock.
iirc, it's complicated. Some instructions don't reduce the frequency; some reduce it a little; some reduce it a lot.
I'm not sure AVX2 is as ubiquitous as the README says: "We assume AVX2 support which is available in all recent mainstream x86 processors produced by AMD and Intel."
I guess "mainstream" is somewhat subjective, but some recent Chromebooks have Celeron processors with no AVX2:
https://us-store.acer.com/chromebook-14-cb3-431-c5fm
https://ark.intel.com/products/91831/Intel-Celeron-Processor...
Because someone wanting 2.2GB/s JSON parsing is deploying to a chromebook...
It doesn't seem that laughable to me to want faster JSON parsing on a Chromebook, given how heavily JSON is used to communicate between webservers and client-side Javascript.
"Faster" meaning faster than Chromebooks do now; 2.2 GB/s may simply be unachievable hardware-wise with these cheap processors. They're kinda slow, so any speed increase would be welcome.
AVX2 also incurs some pretty large penalties for switching between SSE and AVX2. Depending on the amount of time taken in the library between calls, it could be problematic.
This looks mostly applicable to server scenarios where the runtime environment is highly controlled.
There is no real penalty for switching between SSE and AVX2, unless you do it wrong. What are you referring to specifically?
Are you talking about state transition penalties that can occur if you forget a vzeroupper? That's the only thing I'm aware of which kind of matches that.
A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
Full disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand.
There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deliver them. We become a victim of our success. The blockchain will grow very rapidly. A terabyte a month is possible. The storage issue associated with our performance can quickly become an issue. The Vault paper is focused on solving this and other storage scaling problems.
The Algorand pure proof-of-stake blockchain and associated cryptocurrency has many novel innovations aside from Vault. It possesses security and scalability properties beyond what any other blockchain technology allows while still being completely decentralized. Our website, algorand.com, and whitepaper are great places to start to learn more.
If you learn best from videos then I suggest you watch Turing award winner and cryptographic pioneer, Silvio Micali, talk about Algorand: https://youtu.be/NykZ-ZSKkxM. He is a captivating speaker and the founder of Algorand.
Are there reasons that e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum and Stellar could not implement some of these more performant approaches that Algorand [1] and Vault [2] have developed, published, and implemented? Which would require a hard fork?
[2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/117821
My understanding is that PoS approaches follow normal byzantine agreement theory which states that adversaries cannot control more than 1/3rd of the accounts (or money in the case of algorand). You can also delay new blocks more easily.
Ethereum is scared or that so they are implementing some hybrid form.
Bitcoin is doomed from my perspective, because of the focus on proof of work and the confirmation times. When you realize that algorand is super fast, there is no "confirmation time", and there is no waste in energy to mine, then it is hard to back up any cryptocurrency focusing on proof of work.
And what of decentralized premined chains (with no PoW, no PoS, and far less energy use) that release coins with escrow smart contracts over time such as Ripple and Stellar (and close a new ledger every few seconds)?
> Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deliver them. We become a victim of our success. The blockchain will grow very rapidly. A terabyte a month is possible. The storage issue associated with our performance can quickly become an issue. The Vault paper is focused on solving this and other storage scaling problems.
What prevents a person from using a chain like IPFS?
Ethereum Casper PoS has been under review for quite some time.
Why isn't all Bitcoin on Lightning Network?
Bitcoin could make bootstrapping faster by choosing a considered-good blockhash and balances, but AFAIU, re-verifying transactions like Bitcoin and derivatives do prevents hash collision attacks that are currently considered infeasible for SHA-256 (especially given a low block size).
There was an analysis somewhere where they calculated the cloud server instance costs of mounting a ~51% attack (which applies to PoW chains) for various blockchains.
Bitcoin is not profitable to mine in places without heavily subsidized dirty/clean energy anymore: energy and Bitcoin commodity costs and prices have intersected. They'll need any of: inexpensive clean energy, more efficient chips, higher speculative value.
Energy arbitrage (grid-scale energy storage) may be more profitable now. We need energy storage in order to reach 100% renewable energy (regardless of floundering policy support).
Ripple is not decentralized. I don't know enough about Stellar to answer.
Bitcoin is software and can easily implement these features but the community is divided and can't reach consensus on anything. Lightning Network as layer two solution is pretty good from what I know.
Ethereum improvements are coming along very slowly and that's good. They're the only blockchain with active engagement by thousands of multiple parties.
Aragaon and Vault's papers might sound good, but who knows how they'll turn out in production.
People argue this all day. There's a lot of FUD.
Ripple only runs ~7% of validator nodes; which is far less centralized control than major Bitcoin mining pools and businesses (who do the deciding in regards to the many Bitcoin hard forks); that's one form of decentralization.
Ripple clients can use their own UNL or use the Ripple-approved UNL.
Ripple is traded on a number of exchanges (though fewer than Bitcoin for certain); that's another form of decentralization.
As an open standard, ILP will further reduce vendor lock in (and increase interoperability between) networks that choose to implement it.
There are forks of Ripple (e.g. Stellar) just like there are forks of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
From https://ripple.com/insights/the-inherently-decentralized-nat... :
> In contrast, the XRP Ledger requires 80 percent of validators on the entire network, over a two-week period, to continuously support a change before it is applied. Of the approximately 150 validators today, Ripple runs only 10. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum — where one miner could have 51 percent of the hashing power — each Ripple validator only has one vote in support of an exchange or ordering a transaction.
How does your definition of 'decentralized' differ?
[deleted]
Git-signatures – Multiple PGP signatures for your commits
Is there anything out there that doesn't need GPG? Having a working GPG install is a huge lift for developers.
I take this to mean: apart from the barnacles on GPG, could there be a system which does what GPG does for software development (signing), without the non-functioning web-of-trust of GPG, or the hierarchical system of x509 signing? Something that deals with lost keys, compromised keys/accounts, loss of DNS control, MitMing, MitBing, etc?
I think it is probably in the class of problems where there are no great foolproof solutions. However, I can imagine that techniques like certificate transparency (all signed x509 certificates pushed to a shared log) would be quite useful. Even blockchain techniques. Maybe send someone to check on me, I'm feeling unwell having written that.
> I think it is probably in the class of problems where there are no great foolproof solutions. However, I can imagine that techniques like certificate transparency (all signed x509 certificates pushed to a shared log) would be quite useful.
Securing DNS: "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181362"
> Certs on the Blockchain: "Can we merge Certificate Transparency with blockchain?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18961724
> Namecoin (decentralized blockchain DNS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
(Your first link is broken.)
My main problem with blockchain is the excessive energy consumption of PoW. I know there are PoS efforts, but they seem problematical.
I like the recent CertLedger paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1071.pdf
My mistake. How ironic. Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow. Here's that link without the trailing ": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181362
> My main problem with blockchain is the excessive energy consumption of PoW. I know there are PoS efforts, but they seem problematical.
One report said that 78% of Bitcoin energy usage is from renewable sources (many of which would otherwise be curtailed and otherwise unfunded due to flat-to-falling demand for electricity). But PoW really is expensive and hopefully the market will choose less energy-inefficient solutions from the existing and future blockchain solutions while keeping equal or better security assurances.
>> Proof of Work (Bitcoin, ...), Proof of Stake (Ethereum Casper), Proof of Space, Proof of Research (GridCoin, CureCoin,)
The spec should be: DDOS resiliant (without a SPOF), no one entity with control over API and/or database credentials and database backups and the clock, and immutable.
Immutability really cannot be ensured with hashed records that incorporate the previous record's hash as a salt in a blocking centralized database because someone ultimately has root and the clock and all the backups and code vulnerable to e.g. [No]SQL injection; though distributed 'replication' and detection of record modification could be implemented. git push -f may be detected if it's on an already-replicated branch; but git depends upon local timestamps. google/trillian does Merkle trees in a centralized database (for Certificate Transparency).
In quickly reading the git-signatures shell script sources, I wasn't certain whether the git-notes branch with the .gitsigners that are fetched from all n keyservers (with DNS) is also signed?
I also like the "Table 1: Security comparison of Log Based Approaches to Certificate Management" in the CertLedger paper. Others are far more qualified to compare implementations.
You read my mind. I'd love if it could be rooted in a Yubikey.
Decoupling the "signing" and "verifying" parts seem like a good idea. As random Person signs something, how someone else figures out how to go trust that signature is a separate problem.
> I'd love if it could be rooted in a Yubikey.
FIDO2 and Yubico helped develop the new W3C WebAuthn standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn
But WebAuthn does not solve for WoT or PKI or certificate pinning.
> Decoupling the "signing" and "verifying" parts seem like a good idea. As random Person signs something, how someone else figures out how to go trust that signature is a separate problem.
Someone can probably help with terminology here. There's identification (proving that a person has the key AND that it's their key (biometrics, challenge-response)), signing (using a key to create a cryptographic signature – for the actual data or a reasonably secure cryptographic hash of said data – that could only could have been created with the given key), signature verification (checking that the signature was created by the claimed key for the given data), and then there's trusting that the given key is authorized for a specific purpose (Web of Trust (key-signing parties), PKI, ACME, exchange of symmetric keys over a different channel such as QKD) by e.g. signing a structured document that links cryptographic keys with keys for specific authorized functions and trusting the key(s) used to sign said authorizing document.
Private (e.g. Zero Knowledge) blockchains can be used for key exchange and key rotation. Public blockchains can be used for sharing (high-entropy) key components; also with an optional exchange of money to increase the cost of key compromise attempts.
There's also WKD: "Web Key Directory"; which hosts GPG keys over HTTPS from a .well-known URL for a given user@domain identifier: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD
Compared to existing PGP/GPG keyservers, WKD does rely upon HTTPS.
TUF is based on Thandy. TUF: "The Update Framework" does not presume channel security (is designed to withstand channel compromise) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Update_Framework_(TUF)
The TUF spec doesn't mention PGP/GPG: https://github.com/theupdateframework/specification/blob/mas...
There's a derivative of TUF for automotive applications called Uptane: https://uptane.github.io
The Bitcoin article on multisignature; 1-of-2, 2-of-2, 2-of-3, 3-of-5, etc.: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature
Running an LED in reverse could cool future computers
"Near-field photonic cooling through control of the chemical potential of photons" (2019) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0918-8
Compounding Knowledge
Buffet’s approach to life is interesting for the same reason an Olympic gymnast is interesting. He has specialized to an extreme and is taking advantage of the rewards of that specialization and natural talent in a unique way.
It’s easy for me to feel shame that I don’t read 8 hours per day, as Warren and Charlie do. Buffett is a phenomenal investor but by all accounts, rather odd. He eats like crap, doesn’t exercise, had a profoundly weird relationship with his wife, and seems addicted to his work at the expense of everything else.
My point is this: his practice of reading income statements and business reports 8 hours per day for 60 years doesn’t make him the kind of person I wish to emulate.
Don’t get me wrong, I respect his levelheadedness toward money, lack of polish wrt PR, and generous philanthropic efforts. There’s a lot of good. But it’s easy to idolize the guy.
Controversial take: Buffett is actually not a great investor in the way people think. Via the float in his insurance companies, he receives a 0% infinite maturity loan to plow into the market. That financial leverage gives him the ability to beat the market year after year - not his own stockpicking prowess.
If you were to start with $1B, then get an extra $2B that you never had to pay back, you too would do quite well holding Coca-Cola and other safe companies with moats. Your returns would be 3x everyone else's.
Buffett himself has tried to explain the impact of float on Berkshire Hathaway but it never seems to sink in with people.
Ill take it even farther: Buffet isn't statistically different than average. He just found a strategy that happened to work, was stubborn enough to stick to it through bad times, and used copious amounts of leverage to juice returns.
A really interesting paper called "Buffet's Alpha" talks about this, and was able to replicate his performance by following a few simple rules. They found that he produced very little actual alpha. To his credit, he seems to have been observant enough to stumble into factors(value, quality, and low beta) before anyone else knew they existed, which is his real strength and contribution.
A summary of that paper from the authors is here: https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/Journal-Article/Buffet....
They work at AQR, a firm which is notable for being one of the only successful hedge funds to actually publish meaningful research.
The paper's conclusion is noteworthy:
> The efficient market counterargument is that Buffett was simply lucky. Our findings suggest that Buffett’s success is neither luck nor magic but is a reward for a successful implementation of value and quality exposures that have historically produced high returns. Second, we illustrated how Buffett’s record can be viewed as an expression of the practical implementability of academic factor returns after transaction costs and financing costs. We simulated how investors can try to take advan- tage of similar investment principles. Buffett’s success shows that the high returns of these academic factors are not simply “paper” returns; these returns can be realized in the real world after transaction costs and funding costs, at least by Warren Buffett. Furthermore, Buffett’s exposure to the BAB factor and his unique access to leverage are consistent with the idea that the BAB factor represents reward to the use of leverage.
BTW, AQR funded the initial development of pandas; which now powers tools like alphalens (predictive factor analysis) and pyfolio.
There's your 'compounding knowledge'.
(Days later)
"7 Best Community-Built Value Investing Algorithms Using Fundamentals" https://blog.quantopian.com/fundamentals-contest-winners/
(The Zipline backtesting library also builds upon Pandas)
How can we factor ESG/sustainability reporting into these fundamentals-driven algorithms in order to save the world?
I wonder to what extent Warren Buffet is Warren Buffet because of how he thinks and acts (like all of these non-fiction authors selling books by using his name would have us believe), and to what extent he is the product of media selection bias. -- If you take a large enough group of people who take risky stakes that are large enough (like the world of financial asset management), then one of them is bound to be as successful as Warren Buffet, even if they all behave randomly.
Funnily enough, Buffett actually calculated this in his essay "The Super Investors of Graham and Doddsville"
Basically, advocates of the Free Market Hypotheses believed that it was impossible for anyone to deliberately, repeatedly generate alpha. The market was rational, and success was probabilistically distributed. With a large enough population, you will get Buffett level returns - therefor Buffett is a fluke.
However, Buffett calculated that there weren't enough investors for his success to be a factor of random distribution, plus there were 2 dozen others who followed a similar strategy who also consistently generate alpha
"The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville" (1984) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17265410477248371...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-a... :
> The speech and article challenged the idea that equity markets are efficient through a study of nine successful investment funds generating long-term returns above the market index.
This book probably doesn't mention that he's given away over 71% to charity since Y2K. Or that it's really cold and windy and snowy in Omaha; which makes for lots of reading time.
"Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements: The Search for the Company with a Durable Competitive Advantage" (2008) [1], "Buffetology" (1999) [2], and "The Intelligent Investor" (1949, 2009) [3] are more investment-strategy-focused texts.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Interpretation-Finan...
[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Buffettology-Previously-Unexplained...
[3] https://smile.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Inv...
Value Investing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_investing https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valueinvesting.asp
Why CISA Issued Our First Emergency Directive
There are a number of efforts to secure DNS (and SSL/TLS which generally depends upon DNS; and upon which DNS-over-HTTPS depends) and the identity proof systems which are used for record-change authentication and authorization.
Domain registrars can and SHOULD implement multi-factor authentication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication
Are there domain registrars that support FIDO/U2F or the new W3C WebAuthn spec? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn
Credentials and blockchains (and biometrics): https://gist.github.com/westurner/4345987bb29fca700f52163c33...
DNSSEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System_Security_Ex...
ACME / LetsEncrypt certs expire after 3 months (*) and require various proofs of domain ownership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Certificate_Manageme...
Certificate Transparency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
Certs on the Blockchain: "Can we merge Certificate Transparency with blockchain?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18961724
Namecoin (decentralized blockchain DNS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
DNSCrypt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSCrypt
DNS over HTTPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS
DNS over TLS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_TLS
Chrome will Soon Let You Share Links to a Specific Word or Sentence on a Page
I would like to urge the browser developers/makers to adopt existing proposals which came through open consensus which do precisely cover the same use cases (and more!)
W3C Reference Note on Selectors and States: https://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-states/
It is part of the suite of specs that came through the W3C Web Annotation Working Group: https://www.w3.org/annotation/
More examples in W3C Note Embedding Web Annotations in HTML: https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-html/
Different kinds of Web resources can combine multiple selectors and states. Here is a simple one using `TextQuoteSelector` handled by the https://dokie.li/ clientside application:
http://csarven.ca/dokieli-rww#selector(type=TextQuoteSelecto...
A screenshot/how-to: https://twitter.com/csarven/status/981924087843950595
"Integration with W3C Web Annotations" https://github.com/bokand/ScrollToTextFragment/issues/4
> It would be great to be able to comment on the linked resource text fragment. W3C Web Annotations [implementations] don't recognize the targetText parameter, so AFAIU comments are then added to the document#fragment and not the specified text fragment. [...]
> Is there a simplified mapping of W3C Web Annotations to URI fragment parameters?
Guidelines for keeping a laboratory notebook
My paper notebooks were always horrific. Writing has always been painful and awkward for me. But I could type like nobody's business thanks to programming. I survived college in the early 80s by being one of the first students to get a word processor.
By the time I was keeping a notebook, my work was generating mountains of computer readable data, source code, and so forth. We managed by agreeing on a format for data files, where the filename referenced a notebook page, and it worked OK.
Today, it's unavoidable that people are going to keep their notes electronically, and there are no perfect solutions for doing this. Wet chemists still like paper notebooks, since it's hard to get a computer close to the bench, and to type while wearing rubber gloves. Academic workers are expected to supply their own computers, and are nervous about getting them damaged or contaminated. Plus, drawing pictures and writing equations on a computer are both awkward.
Computation related fields lend themselves well to purely electronic notebooks, no surprise. Today, a lot of my work fits perfectly in a Jupyter notebook.
Commercial notebook software exists, but it tends to be sold largely for enterprise use, i.e., the solution it solves is how to control lab workers and secure their results, not how to enable independent, creative work.
> Computation related fields lend themselves well to purely electronic notebooks, no surprise. Today, a lot of my work fits perfectly in a Jupyter notebook.
Some notes and ideas regarding Jupyter notebooks as lab notebooks from "Keeping a Lab Notebook [pdf]": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15710815
Superalgos and the Trading Singularity
Though others didn't, you might find this interesting: "Ask HN: Why would anyone share trading algorithms and compare by performance?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15802785 ( https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-15802785 )
I think there is value in a back-testing module, however, sharing an algo doesn't make sense to me, until unless someone wants to buy mine for an absurd amount.
I think part of the value of sharing knowledge and algorithmic implementations comes from getting feedback from other experts; like peer review and open science and teaching.
Case in point: the first algorithm on this list [1] of community contributed algorithms that were migrated to their new platform is "minimum variance w/ constraint" [2]. Said algorithm showed returns of over 200% as compared with 77% returns from the SPY S&P 500 ETF over the same period, ceteris paribus. In the 69 replies, there are modifications by community members and the original author that exceed 300%.
Working together on open algorithms has positive returns that may exceed advantages of closed algorithmic development without peer review.
[1] https://www.quantopian.com/posts/community-algorithms-migrat...
[2] https://www.quantopian.com/posts/56b6021b3f3b36b519000924
How well does it do in production though and what happens when multiple algos execute the same trades? Does it cause the rest of the algos to adapt and change results? It makes sense to back-test together and work on it, but if it's proven to work, someone will create something to monitor volume on those trades and work against it. I'd be curious to see the same algo do 300% in production, and if so, then my bias would be uncalled for.
> How well does it do in production though and what happens when multiple algos execute the same trades?
Price inflation.
> Does it cause the rest of the algos to adapt and change results?
Trading index ETFs? IDK
> It makes sense to back-test together and work on it, but if it's proven to work, someone will create something to monitor volume on those trades and work against it.
Why does it need to do lots of trades? Is it possible for anyone other than e.g. SEC to review trades by buyer or seller?
> I'd be curious to see the same algo do 300% in production, and if so, then my bias would be uncalled for.
pyfolio does tear sheets with Zipline algos: pyfolio/examples/zipline_algo_example.ipynb https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/quantopian/pyfolio/blob/...
alphalens does performance analysis of predictive factors: alphalens/examples/pyfolio_integration.ipynb https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/quantopian/alphalens/blo...
awesome-quant lists a bunch of other tools for algos and superalgos: https://github.com/wilsonfreitas/awesome-quant
What's a good platform for paper trading (with e.g. zipline or moonshot algorithms)?
I disagree with price inflation just because everything is hedged, but it may be true.
The too many trades is if there are 300 algos, and I look in the order book and see different orders from different exchanges at the same price point, then I would be adapting to see what's happening, not myself, but there are people who watch order flows.
I don't paper trade, either it works in production with real money or not. Have to get a feel for spreads, commissions, and so on.
Also, in my case, I am hesitant to even use paid services as someone can be watching it, so most my tools are made by me. Good luck with your trading though, if it works out, let me know, I'd pay to use it along side my other trades.
Crunching 200 years of stock, bond, currency and commodity data
Coming from a CS/Econ/Finance background....
Efficiency as “the market fully processes all information” is decidedly untrue.
Efficiency as “Its very hard to arb markets without risk better than a passive strategy” is very true.
Most professional money managers don’t beat the market once you factor in fees. Many private equity funds produce outsize returns, but it’s based on higher risk and taking advantage of tax laws.
Over time, positive performance for mutual funds don’t persist. (If you’re in the top decile performance one year, you’re no more likely to be there next year)
Despite all of this, there are ways people make money. But it’s a small subset of professionals. It’s high frequency traders who find ways to cut the line on mounds of pennies. It inside information from hedge funds. Or earlier access to non public information. But it’s generally not in areas that normal people like you and me can access.
It inside information from hedge funds. Or earlier access to non public information. But it’s generally not in areas that normal people like you and me can access.
Asymmetric information is pretty far from what used to be said about the perfect market and rational actors. It's "there's a sucker born every minute" and "if it seems too good to be true it probably is" economics.
I might be misunderstanding what you're saying here, but are you sure you're right? Fama originally predicated the model of the efficient market (the efficient market hypothesis) on the idea of informational efficiency. Information asymmetry is a fundamental measure involved in the idealized model of an efficient market.
What you're mentioning about rational actors is actually a different topic altogether in economics.
Or have I misunderstood what you're getting at?
I was interested, so I did some research here.
Rational Choice Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory
Rational Behavior https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-behavior.asp
> Most mainstream academic economics theories are based on rational choice theory.
> While most conventional economic theories assume rational behavior on the part of consumers and investors, behavioral finance is a field of study that substitutes the idea of “normal” people for perfectly rational ones. It allows for issues of psychology and emotion to enter the equation, understanding that these factors alter the actions of investors, and can lead to decisions that may not appear to be entirely rational or logical in nature. This can include making decisions based primarily on emotion, such as investing in a company for which the investor has positive feelings, even if financial models suggest the investment is not wise.
Behavioral finance https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/behavioralfinance.asp
Bounded rationality > Relationship to behavioral economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
Perfectly rational decisions can be and are made without perfect information; bounded by the information available at the time. If we all had perfect information, there would be no entropy and no advantage; just lag and delay between credible reports and order entry.
Information asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
Heed these words wisely: What foolish games! Always breaking my heart.
https://deepmind.com/blog/game-theory-insights-asymmetric-mu...
> Asymmetric games also naturally model certain real-world scenarios such as automated auctions where buyers and sellers operate with different motivations. Our results give us new insights into these situations and reveal a surprisingly simple way to analyse them. While our interest is in how this theory applies to the interaction of multiple AI systems, we believe the results could also be of use in economics, evolutionary biology and empirical game theory among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency
> A Pareto improvement is a change to a different allocation that makes at least one individual or preference criterion better off without making any other individual or preference criterion worse off, given a certain initial allocation of goods among a set of individuals. An allocation is defined as "Pareto efficient" or "Pareto optimal" when no further Pareto improvements can be made, in which case we are assumed to have reached Pareto optimality.
Which, I think, brings me to equitable availability of maximum superalgo efficiency and limits of real value creation in capital and commodities markets; which'll have to be a topic for a different day.
Show HN: React-Schemaorg: Strongly-Typed Schema.org JSON-LD for React
I have a slightly longer post describing this work and the reasoning behind it on dev.to[1].
[1]: https://dev.to/eyassh/react-schemaorg-strongly-typed-schemaorg-json-ld-for-react-4lhdhttps://dev.to/eyassh/react-schemaorg-strongly-typed-schemao...
Is there a good way to generate JSONschema and thus forms from schema.org RDFS classes and (nested, repeatable) properties?
By JSONschema do you mean [this standard](https://json-schema.org/)? I don't know of a tool that does that yet, the JSON Schema is general enough with allOf/anyOf that it should express schema.org schema as well.
Depends on the purpose here. With this, my goal was to speed up the Write-Update-Debug development loop. Depends on the use case, simply using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool [1] might be a better way to verify schema than JSON-schema?
[1]: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-toolThere are a number of tools for generating forms and requisite client and serverside data validations from JSONschema; but I'm not aware of any for RDFS (and thus the schema.org schema [1]). A different use case, for certain.
https://schema.org/docs/developers.html#defs
Definitely a cool area for exploration. I'm not aware of JSON Schema generators from RDFS either.
It should be possible to model the basics (nested structure, repeated structure, defining the "domain" and "range" of a value).
Schema.org definitions however have no conception of "required" values[], however, so some of the cool form validation we see in some of these tools might not apply here.
[*] _Consumers_ of Schema.org JSON-LD or microdata, however, might define their own data requirements. E.g. Google has some concept of required fields, which you can see when using the Structured Data Testing Tool.Consumer Protection Bureau Aims to Roll Back Rules for Payday Lending
From the article:
> The way payday loans work is that payday lenders typically offer small loans to borrowers who promise to pay the loans back by their next paycheck. Interest on the loans can have an annual percentage rate of 390 percent or more, according to a 2013 report by the CFPB. Another bureau report from the following year found that most payday loans — as many as 80 percent — are rolled over into another loan within two weeks. Borrowers often take out eight or more loans a year.
390%
From https://www.npr.org/2019/02/06/691944789/consumer-protection... :
> TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6% and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.[2][3]
0.6%
Is your point that the US government should get into the payday lending business?
Lectures in Quantitative Economics as Python and Julia Notebooks
It's amazing how we are watching use cases for notebooks and spreadsheets converging. I wonder what the killer feature will be to bring a bigger chunk of the Excel world into a programmatic mindset... Or alternatively, whether we will see notebook UIs embedded in Excel in the future in place of e.g. VBA.
That’s not a bad idea. Spreadsheets are pure functional languages built that use literal spaces instead of namespaces.
Notebooks are cells of logic. You could conceivably change the idea of notebook cells to be an instance of a function that points to raw data and returns raw data.
Perhaps this just Alteryx though
This is brilliant.
I'm picturing the ability to write a Python function with the parameters being just like the parameters in an Excel function. You can drag the cell and have it duplicated throughout a row, updating the parameters to correspond to the rows next to it.
It would exponentially expand the power of excel. I wouldn't be limited to horribly unmaintainable little Excel functions.
VBA can't be used to do that, can it? As far as I understand (and I haven't investigated VBA too much) VBA works on entire spreadsheets.
Essentially, replace the excel formula `=B3-B4` with a Python function `subtract(b3, b4)` where Subtract is defined somewhere more conveniently (in a worksheet wide function definition list?).
This would require a reactive recomputing of cells to be anything like a spreadsheet. > Essentially, replace the excel formula `=B3-B4` with a Python function `subtract(b3, b4)`
as of now jupyter/ipython would not recompute `subtract(b3, b4)` if you change b3 or b4, this has positive and negative (reliance on hidden state and order of execution) effects.
I too would really like something like this, but I think it is pretty far away from where jupiter is now.
You can build something like this with Jupyter today.
> Traitlets is a framework that lets Python classes have attributes with type checking, dynamically calculated default values, and ‘on change’ callbacks. https://traitlets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
> Traitlet events. Widget properties are IPython traitlets and traitlets are eventful. To handle changes, the observe method of the widget can be used to register a callback https://ipywidgets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/Widget%...
You can definitely build interactive notebooks with Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab (and ipywidgets or Altair or HoloViews and Bokeh or Plotly for interactive data visualization).
> Qgrid is a Jupyter notebook widget which uses SlickGrid to render pandas DataFrames within a Jupyter notebook. This allows you to explore your DataFrames with intuitive scrolling, sorting, and filtering controls, as well as edit your DataFrames by double clicking cells. https://github.com/quantopian/qgrid
Qgrid's API includes event handler registration: https://qgrid.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
> neuron is a robust application that seamlessly combines the power of Visual Studio Code with the interactivity of Jupyter Notebook. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=neuron.n...
"Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback" (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15927132
OpenOffice Calc ships with Python 2.7 support: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Python
Procedural scripts written in a general purpose language with named variables (with no UI input except for chart design and persisted parameter changes) are reproducible.
What's a good way to review all of the formulas and VBA and/or Python and data ETL in a spreadsheet?
Is there a way to record a reproducible data transformation script from a sequence of GUI interactions in e.g. OpenRefine or similar?
OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Jupyter
"Within the Python context, a Python OpenRefine client allows a user to script interactions within a Jupyter notebook against an OpenRefine application instance, essentially as a headless service (although workflows are possible where both notebook-scripted and live interactions take place. https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki/Jupyter
Are there data wrangling workflows that are supported by OpenRefine but not Pandas, Dask, or Vaex?
This interesting need to have a closer look, possibly refine can be more efficient? But haven't used it enough to know, just payed around with it a bit. Didn't realise you could combine it with jupyter.
There are undergraduate and graduate courses in each language:
Python version: https://lectures.quantecon.org/py/
Julia version: https://lectures.quantecon.org/jl/
Does anyone else find it strange that there is no real-world data in these notebooks? It's all simulations or abstract problems.
This gives me the sense, personally, that economists aren't interested in making accurate predictions about the world. Other fields would, I think, test their theories against observations.
pandas-datareader can pull data from e.g. FRED, Eurostat, Quandl, World Bank: https://pandas-datareader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/remote_da...
pandaSDMX can pull SDMX data from e.g. ECB, Eurostat, ILO, IMF, OECD, UNSD, UNESCO, World Bank; with requests-cache for caching data requests: https://pandasdmx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#supported-data-p...
The scikit-learn estimator interface includes a .score() method. "3.3. Model evaluation: quantifying the quality of predictions" https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/model_evaluation.htm...
statsmodels also has various functions for statistically testing models: https://www.statsmodels.org/stable/
"latex2sympy parses LaTeX math expressions and converts it into the equivalent SymPy form" and is now merged into SymPy master and callable with sympy.parsing.latex.parse_latex(). It requires antlr-python-runtime to be installed. https://github.com/augustt198/latex2sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13706
IDK what Julia has for economic data retrieval and model scoring / cost functions?
If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
From the US Digital Services Playbook [1]:
> PLAY 13
> Default to open
> When we collaborate in the open and publish our data publicly, we can improve Government together. By building services more openly and publishing open data, we simplify the public’s access to government services and information, allow the public to contribute easily, and enable reuse by entrepreneurs, nonprofits, other agencies, and the public.
> Checklist
> - Offer users a mechanism to report bugs and issues, and be responsive to these reports
> [...]
> - Ensure that we maintain contractual rights to all custom software developed by third parties in a manner that is publishable and reusable at no cost
> [...]
> - When appropriate, publish source code of projects or components online
> [...]
> Key Questions
> [...]
> - If the codebase has not been released under an open source license, explain why.
> - What components are made available to the public as open source?
> [...]
Apache Arrow 0.12.0
> Apache Arrow is a cross-language development platform for in-memory data. It specifies a standardized language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic operations on modern hardware. It also provides computational libraries and zero-copy streaming messaging and interprocess communication. Languages currently supported include C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust.
Statement on Status of the Consolidated Audit Trail (2018)
U.S. Federal District Court Declared Bitcoin as Legal Money
"Application of FinCEN's Regulations to Persons Administering, Exchanging, or Using Virtual Currencies" (2013) https://www.fincen.gov/resources/statutes-regulations/guidan...
"Legality of bitcoin by country or territory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country...
"Know your customer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
"Anti-money-laundering measures by region" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering#Anti-money-la...
"Anti-money-laundering measures by region > United States" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering#United_States
Post Quantum Crypto Standardization Process – Second Round Candidates Announced
> As the latest step in its program to develop effective defenses, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has winnowed the group of potential encryption tools—known as cryptographic algorithms—down to a bracket of 26. These algorithms are the ones NIST mathematicians and computer scientists consider to be the strongest candidates submitted to its Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization project, whose goal is to create a set of standards for protecting electronic information from attack by the computers of both tomorrow and today.
> “These 26 algorithms are the ones we are considering for potential standardization, and for the next 12 months we are requesting that the cryptography community focus on analyzing their performance,”
Links to the 17 public-key encryption and key-establishment algorithms and 9 digital signature algorithms are here: "Round 2 Submissions" https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Post-Quantum-Cryptography/Rou...
"Quantum Algorithm Zoo" has moved to https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org .
Ask HN: How do you evaluate security of OSS before importing?
What tools can I use to evaluate the security posture of an OSS project before I approve its usage with high confidence?
Oddly, whether a project has at least one CVE reported could be interpreted in favor of the project. https://www.cvedetails.com
Do they have a security disclosure policy? A dedicated security mailing list?
Do they pay bounties or participate in e.g Pwn2own?
Do they cryptographically sign releases?
Do they cryptographically sign VCS tags (~releases)? commits? `git tag -s` / `git commit/merge -S` https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work
Downstream packagers do sometimes/often apply additional patches and then sign their release with the repo (and thus system global) GPG key.
Whether they require "Signed-off-by" may indicate that the project has mature controls and possibly a formal code review process requirement. (Look for "Signed-off-by:" in the release branch (`git commit/merge -s/--signoff`)
How have they integrated security review into their [iterative] release workflow?
Is the software formally verified? Are parts of the software implementation or spec formally verified?
Does the system trust the channel? The host? Is it a 'trustless' system?
What are the single points of failure?
How is logging configured? To syslog?
Do they run the app as root in a Docker container? Does it require privileged containers?
If it has to run as root, does it drop privileges at startup?
Does the package have an SELinux or AppArmor policy? (Or does it say e.g. "just set SELinux to permissive mode)
Is there someone you can pay to support the software in an enterprise environment? Open or closed, such contacts basically never accept liability; but if there is an SLA, do you get a pro-rated bill?
As far as indicators of actual software quality:
How much test coverage is there? Line coverage or statement coverage?
Do they run static analysis tools for all pull requests and releases? Dynamic analysis? Fuzzing?
Of course, closed or open source projects may do none or all of these and still be totally secure, insecure, or unsecure.
This is a pretty extensive list. Thanks for sharing!
Ask HN: How can I use my programming skills to support nonprofit organizations?
Lately I've been thinking about doing programming for nonprofits, both because I want to help out with what I'm good at but also to hone my skills and potentially get some open source credit.
So far I've had a hard time finding nonprofit projects where I can just pick up something and start programming. I know about freecodecamp.org, but they force you to go through their courses, and as I already have multiple years of experience as a developer, I feel like that would be a waste of time.
Isn't there a way to contribute to nonprofit organization in a more direct and simple manner like how you would contribute to an open source project on GitHub?
There are lots of project management systems with issue tracking and kanban boards with swimlanes. Because it's unreasonable to expect all volunteers to have a GH account or even understand what GH is for, support for external identity management and SSO may be essential to getting people to actually log in and change their password regularly.
Sidling a nonprofit with custom built software with no other maintainers is not what they need. Build (and pay for development, maintenance, timely security upgrades and security review) or Buy (where is our data? who backs it up? how much does it cost for a month or a few years? Is it open source with a hosted option; so that we can pay a developer to add or fix what we need?)
"Solutions architect" may be a more helpful objective title for what's needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_architecture
What are their needs? Marketing, accounting, operations, HR
Marketing: web site, maps service, directions, active social media presence that speaks to their defined audience
Accounting: Revenue and expenses, payroll/benefits/HR, projections, "How can we afford to do more?", handle donations and send receipts for tax purposes, reports to e.g. https://charitynavigator.org/ and infographics for wealth-savvy donors
Operations: Asset inventory, project management, volunteer scheduling
HR: payroll, benefits, volunteer scheduling, training, turnover, retaining selfless and enlightenedly-self-interested volunteers
Create a spreadsheet. Rows: needs/features/business processes. Columns: essential, nice to have, software products and services.
Create another spreadsheet. Rows: APIs. Columns: APIs.
Training: what are the [information systems] processes/workflows/checklists? How can I suggest a change? How do we reach consensus that there's a better way to do this? Is there a wiki? Is there a Q&A system?
"How much did you sink on that? Probably seemed like the best option according to the information available at the time, huh? Do you have a formal systems acquisition process? Who votes according to what type of prepared analysis? How much would it cost to switch? What do we need to do to ETL (extract, transform, and load) into a newer better system?"
When estimating TCO for a nonprofit, turnover is a very real consideration. People move. Chances are, as with most organizations TBH, there's a patchwork of partially-integrated and maybe-integrable systems that it may or may not be more cost-effective and maintainable to replace with a cloud ERP specifically designed for nonprofits.
Who has access rights to manually update which parts of the website? How can we include dynamic ([other] database-backed) content in our website? What is a CMS? What is an ERP? What is a CRM? Are these customers, constituents, or both? When did we last speak with those guys? How can people share our asks with social media networks?
If you're not willing or able to make a long-term commitment, the more responsible thing to do is probably to disclose any conflicts of interest recommend a SaaS solution hosted in a compliant data center.
q="nonprofit erp"
q="nonprofit crm"
q="nonprofit cms" + donation campaign visibility
What time of day are social media posts most likely to get maximum engagement from which segments of our audience? What is our ~ARPU "average revenue per user/follower"?
... As a volunteer and not a FTE, it may be a worthwhile exercise to build a prototype of the new functionality with whatever tools you happen to be familiar with with the expectation that they'll figure out a way to accomplish the same objectives with their existing systems. If that's not possible, there may be a business opportunity: are there other organizations with the same need? Is there a sustainable market for such a solution? You may be building to be acquired.
Ask HN: Steps to forming a company?
Hey guys, I'm leaving my firm very shortly to form a startup.
Does why have a checklist of proper ways to do things?
Ie. 1. Form Chapter C Delaware company with Clerky 2. Hire payroll company x 3. use this company for patents.
any info there?
From "Ask HN: What are your favorite entrepreneurship resources" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021659 :
> USA Small Business Administration: "10 steps to start your business." https://www.sba.gov/starting-business/how-start-business/10-...
> "Startup Incorporation Checklist: How to bootstrap a Delaware C-corp (or S-corp) with employee(s) in California" https://github.com/leonar15/startup-checklist
> FounderKit has reviews for Products, Services, and Software for founders: https://founderkit.com
... I've heard good things about Gusto for payroll, HR, and benefits through Guideline: https://gusto.com/product/pricing
A Self-Learning, Modern Computer Science Curriculum
Outstanding resource.
jwasham/coding-interview-university also links to a number of also helpful OER resources: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
MVP Spec
> The criticism of the MVP approach has led to several new approaches, e.g. the Minimum Viable Experiment MVE[19] or the Minimum Awesome Product MAP[20].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product#Critici...
Can we merge Certificate Transparency with blockchain?
From "REMME – A blockchain-based protocol for issuing X.509 client certificates" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18868540 :
""" In no particular order, there are a number of blockchain PKI (and DNS (!)) proposals and proofs of concept.
"CertLedger: A New PKI Model with Certificate Transparency Based on Blockchain" (2018) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.03914 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:LF9PMeqNOLsJ:sc...
"TABLE 1: Security comparison of Log Based Approaches to Certificate Management" (p.12) lists a number of criteria for blockchain-based PKI implementations:
- Resilient to split-world/MITM attack
- Provides revocation transparency
- Eliminates client certificate validation process
- Eliminates trusted key management
- Preserves client privacy
- Require external auditing
- Monitoring promptness
... These papers also clarify why a highly-replicated decentralized trustless datastore — such as a blockchain — is advantageous for PKI. WoT is not mentioned.
"Blockchain-based Certificate Transparency and Revocation Transparency" (2018) https://fc18.ifca.ai/bitcoin/papers/bitcoin18-final29.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:oEsKmJvdn-MJ:sc...
Who can update and revoke which records in a permissioned blockchain (or a plain old database, for that matter)?
Letsencrypt has a model for proving domain control with ACME; which AFAIU depends upon DNS, too. """
TLA references "Certificate Transparency Using Blockchain" (2018) https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1232.pdf https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="Certificate+Transparen...
Thanks for the references! The main issue isn't the support and maintenance of a such distributed network, but its integration with current solutions and avoiding centralized middleware services that will weaken the schema described in the documents.
> The main issue isn't the support and maintenance of a such distributed network,
Running a permissioned blockchain is nontrivial. "Just fork XYZ and call it a day" doesn't quite describe the amount of work involved. There's read latency at scale. There's merging things to maintain vendor strings,
> but its integration with current solutions
- Verify issuee identity
- Update (domain/CN/subjectAltName, date) index
- Update cached cert and CRL bundles
- Propagate changes to all clients
> and avoiding centralized middleware services that will weaken the schema described in the documents.
Eventually, a CDN will look desireable. IPFS may fit the bill, IDK?
> Running a permissioned blockchain is nontrivial.
You are right. It's needed a relevant BFT protocol, a lot of work with masternodes community and smart economic system inside. You can look at an example of a such protocol: https://github.com/Remmeauth/remme-core/tree/dev
google/trillian https://github.com/google/trillian
> Trillian is an implementation of the concepts described in the Verifiable Data Structures white paper, which in turn is an extension and generalisation of the ideas which underpin Certificate Transparency.
> Trillian implements a Merkle tree whose contents are served from a data storage layer, to allow scalability to extremely large trees.
Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?
Which universities teach formal methods?
- q=formal+verification https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+verification
- q=formal-methods https://www.class-central.com/search?q=formal+methods
Is formal verification a required course or curriculum competency for any Computer Science or Software Engineering / Computer Engineering degree programs?
Is there a certification for formal methods? Something like for engineer-status in other industries?
What are some examples of tools and [OER] resources for teaching and learning formal methods?
- JsCoq
- Jupyter kernel for Coq + nbgrader
- "Inconsistencies, rolling back edits, and keeping track of the document's global state" https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/issues/333 (jsCoq + hott [+ IJavascript Jupyter kernel], STLC: Simply-Typed Lambda Calculus)
- TDD tests that run FV tools on the spec and the implementation
What are some examples of open source tools for formal verification (that can be integrated with CI to verify the spec AND the implementation)?
What are some examples of formally-proven open source projects?
- "Quark : A Web Browser with a Formally Verified Kernel" (2012) (Coq, Haskell) http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/
What are some examples of projects using narrow and strong AI to generate perfectly verified software from bad specs that make the customers and stakeholders happy?
From reading though comments here, people don't use formal methods because: cost-prohibitive, inflexibile, perceived as incompatible with agile / iterative methods that are more likely to keep customers who don't know what formal methods are happy, lack of industry-appropriate regulation, and cognitive burden of often-incompatible shorthand notations.
Almost University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) alum, and it's the biggest difference between the Software Engineering course and Comp Sci. There are two mandatory formal methods and more additional ones to take. They are really hard, and mean a lot of the SENG cohort ends up graduating as COMPSCI, since they can't hack it and don't want to repeat formal methods.
Steps to a clean dataset with Pandas
To add to the three points in the article:
Data quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_quality
Imputation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputation_(statistics)
Feature selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_selection
datacleaner can drop NaNs, do imputation with "the mode (for categorical variables) or median (for continuous variables) on a column-by-column basis", and encode "non-numerical variables (e.g., categorical variables with strings) with numerical equivalents" with Pandas DataFrames and scikit-learn. https://github.com/rhiever/datacleaner
sklearn-pandas "[maps] DataFrame columns to transformations, which are later recombined into features", and provides "A couple of special transformers that work well with pandas inputs: CategoricalImputer and FunctionTransformer" https://github.com/scikit-learn-contrib/sklearn-pandas
Featuretools https://github.com/Featuretools/featuretools
> Featuretools is a python library for automated feature engineering. [using DFS: Deep Feature Synthesis]
auto-sklearn does feature selection (with e.g. PCA) in a "preprocessing" step; as well as "One-Hot encoding of categorical features, imputation of missing values and the normalization of features or samples" https://automl.github.io/auto-sklearn/master/manual.html#tur...
auto_ml uses "Deep Learning [with Keras and TensorFlow] to learn features for us, and Gradient Boosting [with XGBoost] to turn those features into accurate predictions" https://auto-ml.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deep_learning.html#...
Reahl – A Python-only web framework
I feel bad about projects like these, I really do. I'm sure a lot of effort have been put in and it probably satisfies what OP wants to do. But in the end, no one serious would ever consider using it.
>But in the end, no one serious would ever consider using it.
Why not?
I would say it is the other way around. For any web application project of decent size there is almost always a transpilation step that converts whatever programming language your source code is in, into JavaScript (usually ES5). We also had very successful and widely used projects like GWT for years (GWT was first released in 2006!!!).
Before GWT, there was Wt framework (C++); and then JWt (Java), which do the server and clientsides (with widgets in a tree).
Wt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wt_(web_toolkit)
JWt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWt_(Java_web_toolkit)
GWT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit
Now we have Babel, ES YYYY, and faster browser release cycles.
[deleted]
Ask HN: How can you save money while living on poverty level?
I freelance remotely, making roughly $1200 a month as a programmer because I only work 10 hours maximum each week (limited by my contract). I share the apartment with my mom, and It's a section 8 so our rent contributions are based on the income we make. My contribution towards rent is $400 a month.
Although I make more money than my mom (she's of retirement age and only works 1-2 days a week), while I'm looking for more work I want to figure out how to move out and live more independently on only $1200 a month.
I need to live frugally and want to know what I can cut more easily. I own a used car (already paid in full), and pay my own car insurance, electricity, phone and internet. After all that I have about $400 left each month which can be eaten up by going out or some emergency funds.
More recently I had to pay for my new city parking sticker so that's $100 more in expenses this particular month. I would be satisfied just living in a far off town paying the same $400 a month, I feel my dollars would stretch further since I now get 100% more privacy for the same price.
On top of that this job is a contract job so I need to put money aside to pay my own taxes. This $1200 is basically living on poverty level. Any ideas to make saving work? Is it very possible for people in the US to still save while on poverty?
That's not a living wage (or a full time job). There are lots of job search sites.
Spending some time on a good resume / CV / portfolio would probably be a good investment with positive ROI.
Is there a nonprofit that you could volunteer with to increase your hireability during the other 158 hours of the week?
Or an online course with a credential that may or may not have positive ROI as a resume item?
Is there a code school in your city with a "you don't pay unless you land a full time job with a living wage and benefits" guarantee?
What is your strategy for business and career networking?
From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-17894632 :
> Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
Personal Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more > Personal finance https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...
"CS 007: Personal Finance For Engineers" https://cs007.blog
A DNS hijacking wave is targeting companies at an almost unprecedented scale
> The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center issued a statement [1] that encouraged administrators to read the FireEye report. [2]
[1] https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2019/01/10/DNS...
[2] https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2019/01/global-...
Show HN: Generate dank mnemonic seed phrases in the terminal
From https://github.com/lukechilds/doge-seed :
> The first four words will be a randomly generated Doge-like sentence.
The seed phrases are fully valid checksummed BIP39 seeds. They can be used with any cryptocurrency and can be imported into any BIP39 compliant wallet.
> […] However there is a slight reduction in entropy due to the introduction of the doge-isms. A doge seed has about 19.415 fewer bits of entropy than a standard BIP39 seed of equivalent length.
Can you sign a quantum state?
> Abstract. Cryptography with quantum states exhibits a number of surprising and counterintuitive features. In a 2002 work, Barnum et al. argued informally that these strange features should imply that digital signatures for quantum states are impossible [6].
> In this work, we perform the first rigorous study of the problem of signing quantum states. We first show that the intuition of [6] was correct, by proving an impossibility result which rules out even very weak forms of signing quantum states. Essentially, we show that any non-trivial combination of correctness and security requirements results in negligible security.
> This rules out all quantum signature schemes except those which simply measure the state and then sign the outcome using a classical scheme. In other words, only classical signature schemes exist.
> We then show a positive result: it is possible to sign quantum states, provided that they are also encrypted with the public key of the intended recipient. Following classical nomenclature, we call this notion quantum signcryption. Classically, signcryption is only interesting if it provides superior efficiency to simultaneous encryption and signing. Our results imply that, quantumly, it is far more interesting: by the laws of quantum mechanics, it is the only signing method available.
> We develop security definitions for quantum signcryption, ranging from a simple one-time two-user setting, to a chosen-ciphertext-secure many-time multi-user setting. We also give secure constructions based on post-quantum public-key primitives. Along the way, we show that a natural hybrid method of combining classical and quantum schemes can be used to “upgrade” a secure classical scheme to the fully-quantum setting, in a wide range of cryptographic settings including signcryption, authenticated encryption, and chosen-ciphertext security.
"Quantum signcryption"
Lattice Attacks Against Weak ECDSA Signatures in Cryptocurrencies [pdf]
From the paper:
Abstract. In this paper, we compute hundreds of Bitcoin private keys and dozens of Ethereum, Ripple, SSH, and HTTPS private keys by carrying out cryptanalytic attacks against digital signatures contained in public blockchains and Internet-wide scans.
REMME – A blockchain-based protocol for issuing X.509 client certificates
pity it's blockchain based
It's unclear to me why you would want a distributed PKI to authenticate a centralized app. Or maybe it's only for dapps?
In no particular order, there are a number of blockchain PKI (and DNS (!)) proposals and proofs of concept.
"CertLedger: A New PKI Model with Certificate Transparency Based on Blockchain" (2018) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.03914 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:LF9PMeqNOLsJ:sc...
"TABLE 1: Security comparison of Log Based Approaches to Certificate Management" (p.12) lists a number of criteria for blockchain-based PKI implementations:
- Resilient to split-world/MITM attack
- Provides revocation transparency
- Eliminates client certificate validation process
- Eliminates trusted key management
- Preserves client privacy
- Require external auditing
- Monitoring promptness
... These papers also clarify why a highly-replicated decentralized trustless datastore — such as a blockchain — is advantageous for PKI. WoT is not mentioned.
"Blockchain-based Certificate Transparency and Revocation Transparency" (2018) https://fc18.ifca.ai/bitcoin/papers/bitcoin18-final29.pdf
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:oEsKmJvdn-MJ:sc...
Who can update and revoke which records in a permissioned blockchain (or a plain old database, for that matter)?
Letsencrypt has a model for proving domain control with ACME; which AFAIU depends upon DNS, too.
California grid data is live – solar developers take note
> It looks like California is at least two generations of technology ahead of other states. Let’s hope the rest of us catch up, so that we have a grid that can make an asset out of every building, every battery, and every solar system.
+1. Are there any other states with similar grid data available for optimization; or any plans to require or voluntarily offer such a useful capability?
Why attend predatory colleges in the US?
> Why would people attend predatory colleges?
Why would people make an investment with insufficient ROI (Return on Investment)?
Insufficient information.
College Scorecard [1] is a database with a web interface for finding and comparing schools according to a number of objective criteria. CollegeScorecard launched in 2015. It lists "Average Annual Cost", "Graduation Rate", and "Salary After Attending" on the search results pages. When you review a detail page for an institution, there are many additional statistics; things like: "Typical Total Debt After Graduation" and "Typical Monthly Loan Payment".
The raw data behind CollegeScorecard can be downloaded from [2]. The "data_dictionary" tab of the "Data Dictionary" spreadsheet describes the data schema.
[1] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov
[2] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
Khan Academy > "College, careers, and more" [3] may be a helpful supplement for funding a full-time college admissions counselor in a secondary education institution
[3] https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
(I haven't the time to earn 10 academia.stackexchange points in order to earn the prestigious opportunity to contribute this answer to such a forum with threaded comments. In the academic journal system, journals sell academics' work (i.e. schema.org/ScholarlyArticle PDFs, mobile-compatible responsive HTML 5, RDFa, JSON-LD structured data) and keep all of the revenue).
"Because I need money for school! Next question. CPU: College Textbook costs and CPI: All over time t?!"
Ask HN: Data analysis workflow?
What kind of workflow do you employ when designing a data-flow or analyzing data?
Let me give a concrete example. For the past year, I have been selling stuff on the interwebs through two payment processors one of them being PayPal.
The selling process was put together with a bunch of SaaS hooking everything together through webhooks and notifications.
Now I need to step it that control and produce a proper flow to handle sign up, subscription and payment.
Before doing that I'm analyzing and trying to conciliate all transactions to make sure the books are OK and nothing went unseen. There lies the problem. I have data coming from different sources such as databases, excel files, CSV exports and some JSON files.
At first, I started dealing with it by having all the data in CSV files and trying to make sense of them using code and running queries within the code.
As I found holes in the data I had to dig up more data from different sources and it became a pain to continue with code. I now imported everything into Postgres and have been "debugging" with SQL.
As I advanced through the process I had to generate a lot of routines to collect and match data. I also have to keep all the data files around and organized which is very hard to do because I'm all over the place trying to find where the problem is.
How do you handle with it? What kind of workflow? Any best practices or recommendations from people who do this for a living?
Pachyderm may be basically what you're looking for. It does data version control with/for language-agnostic pipelines that don't need to always redo the ETL phase. https://www.pachyderm.io
Dask-ML works with {scikit-learn, xgboost, tensorflow, TPOT,}. ETL is your responsibility. Loading things into parquet format affords a lot of flexibility in terms of (non-SQL) datastores or just efficiently packed files on disk that need to be paged into/over in RAM. http://ml.dask.org/examples/scale-scikit-learn.html
Sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline API: {fit(), transform(), predict(), score(),} https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.pi...
https://docs.featuretools.com can also minimize ad-hoc boilerplate ETL / feature engineering :
> Featuretools is a framework to perform automated feature engineering. It excels at transforming temporal and relational datasets into feature matrices for machine learning.
The PLoS 10 Simple Rules papers distill a number of best practices:
"Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research" http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
“Ten Simple Rules for Creating a Good Data Management Plan” http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
In terms of the scientific method, a null hypothesis like "there is no significant relation between the [independent and dependent] variables" may be dangerously unprofessional p-hacking and data dredging; and may result in an overfit model that seems to predict or classify the training and test data (when split with e.g. sklearn.model_selection.train_test_split and a given random seed).
One of these days (in the happy new year!) I'll get around to updating these notes with the aforementioned tools and docs: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/data-science#scienti...
IDK what https://kaggle.com/learn has specifically in terms of analysis workflow? Their docker containers have very many tools configured in a reproducible way: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-python/blob/master/Dockerfi...
Ask HN: What is your favorite open-source job scheduler
Too many business scripts rely on cron(8) to run. Classic cron cannot handle task duration, fail (only with email), same-task piling, linting, ...
So what is your favorite open-source, easy to bundle/deploy job scheduler, that is easy to use, has logging capacity, config file linting, and can handle common use-cases : kill if longer than, limit resources, prevent launching when previous one is nor finished, ...
systemd-crontab-generator may be usable for something like linting classic crontabs? https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron
Systemd/Timers as a cron replacement: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers#As_a_cro...
Celery supports periodic tasks:
> Like with cron, the tasks may overlap if the first task doesn’t complete before the next. If that’s a concern you should use a locking strategy to ensure only one instance can run at a time (see for example Ensuring a task is only executed one at a time).
http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/periodic-t...
How to Version-Control Jupyter Notebooks
Mentioned in the article: manual nbconvert, nbdime, ReviewNB (currently GitHub only), jupytext.
Jupytext includes a bit of YAML in the e.g. Python/R/Julia/Markdown header. https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext
Huge +1s for both nbdime and jupytext. Excellent tools both.
Really enjoying jupytext. I do a bunch of my training from Jupyter and it has made my workflow better.
Teaching and Learning with Jupyter (A book by Jupyter for Education)
Still under heavy development, but already useful. Add we accept Pull Requests to add items or fix issues. Join us!
A small suggestion.
Since Jupyter Notebook can be used for both programming and documentation, why don't you use Jupyter Notebook itself as the source of your document?
It is actually very easy to setup a Jupyter Notebook driven .ipynb -> .html publishing pipeline with github + a local Jupyter instance
Here is a toy example (for my own github page)
https://ontouchstart.github.io/
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io
The convert script is here (also a Jupyter Notebook)
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io/blob/...
You got the ideas.
BTW, to make the system fully replicable, I use docker for the local Jupyter instance, which can be launched via the Makefile
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io/blob/...
Here is the custom Dockerfile:
https://github.com/ontouchstart/ontouchstart.github.io/blob/...
Margin Notes: Automatic code documentation with recorded examples from runtime
Slightly related are Go examples - they're tests, and documentation at the same time. It'd be nice if someone hooks in a listener to automatically collect examples tho
And Elixir's doctests https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/docs-tests-a...
And Python's Axe!
I mean doctest: https://docs.python.org/3/library/doctest.html
1. sys.settrace() for {call, return, exception, c_call, c_return, and c_exception}
2. Serialize as/to doctests. Is there a good way to serialize Python objects as Python code?
3. Add doctests to callables' docstrings with AST
Mutation testing tools may have already implemented serialization to doctests but IDK about docstring modification.
... MOSES is an evolutionary algorithm that mutates and simplifies a combo tree until it has built a function with less error for the given input/output pairs.
Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the quality of the work.
As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output.
Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.
What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.
Open publishing and commenting would be a good start---having a dialog, like is done at conferences. Older academic journal articles (pre 1900) read much more like discussions than like the hundred dollar word vomits of modern academic publishing. The broken incentives are at the core of this rotten fruit, though. Just making journals open isn't enough.
We have (almost) open publishing and open commenting. Did that improve anything?
There's open commenting? I've never seen the back and forth of the review process be published. It should be published.
https://hypothes.is supports threaded comments on anything with a URI; including PDFs and specific sentences or figures thereof. All you have to do is register an account and install the browser extension or include the JS in the HTML.
It's based on open standards and an open platform.
W3C Web Annotations: http://w3.org/annotation
About Hypothesis: https://web.hypothes.is/about/
Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?
There are a lot of fields I'm interested in, such as machine learning, but I struggle to understand how they work as most resources I come across are full of complex mathematical notation that I never learned how to read in school or University.
How do you learn to read this stuff? I'm frequently stumped by an academic paper or book that I just can't understand due to mathematical notation that I simply cannot read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols
These might help a bit.
But as someone with similar problems, I'm beginning to think there's no real solution other than thousands of hours of studying.
There are a number of Wikipedia pages which catalog various uses of symbols for various disciplines:
Outline_of_mathematics#Mathematical_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_mathematics#Mathema...
List_of_mathematical_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols
List_of_mathematical_symbols_by_subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols_b...
Greek_letters_used_in_mathematics,_science,_and_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathemat...
Latin_letters_used_in_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_letters_used_in_mathemat...
For learning the names of symbols (and maybe also their meaning as conventially utilized in a particular field at a particular time in history), spaced repetition with flashcards with a tool like Anki may be helpful.
For typesetting, e.g. Jupyter Notebook uses MathJax to render LaTeX with JS.
latex2sympy may also be helpful for learning notation.
… data-science#mathematical-notation https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/data-science#mathema...
New law lets you defer capital gains taxes by investing in opportunity zones
I believe the way that the program works is you can defer taxes from your original capital gains (and the cost basis gets increased so your deferred taxes are less than you would pay otherwise), reinvest them in an "opportunity zone", and not pay capital gains on your investment on the opportunity zone, if you hold it long enough
e.g. Bob bought Apple stock for $50 a share back in the day, and sells it for $200/share. He defers his taxes until 2026. Instead of paying capital gains tax on $150/share, the cost basis is adjusted by 15% so in addition to benefiting from the time value of money, future Bob will only be taxed on $142.50 of capital gains. Bob can buy a house in an "opportunity zone" (from scrolling around the embedded map, there's plenty of million dollar+ houses in these areas. There's also lots of sports teams and stadiums in these areas, so maybe Bob buys an NFL team or a parking lot next to their stadium), rent it out for 10 years, sell it, and not have to pay any capital gains tax on the appreciation. Definitely not a bad deal for him!
Yes its more akin to a 1031 exchange, but opened up so that non-real estate capital gains are eligible.
Is it just capital gains? Wondering if it applies to any other forms of active or passive income.
How are profits from these investments treated?
Can you "swap til you drop" like with a 1031 exchange?
> Is it just capital gains? Wondering if it applies to any other forms of active or passive income.
I would also like some information about this.
+1 for investing in distressed areas; self-nominated with intent or otherwise.
If it's capital gains only, -1 on requiring sale of capital assets in order to be sufficiently incentivized. (Because then the opportunity to tax-advantagedly invest in Opportunity Zones is denied to persons without assets to liquidate; i.e. unequal opportunity).
How to Write a Technical Paper [pdf]
A few years ago i found a great version of a similar piece that proposed something like a 'sandwich' model for each section, and the work as a whole. A sandwich layer was a hook (something interesting), the meat (what you actually did), and a summary.
I failed to save it and i haven't been able to dig it up again, but I liked the idea. The paper was written in the style it described, as well.
5 paragraph essay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-paragraph_essay
> The five-paragraph essay is a format of essay having five paragraphs: one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs with support and development, and one concluding paragraph. Because of this structure, it is also known as a hamburger essay, one three one, or a three-tier essay.
The digraph presented in the OP really is a great approach, IMHO:
## Introduction
## Related Work, System Model, Problem Statement
## Your Solution
## Analysis
## Simulation, Experimentation
## Conclusion
... "Elements of the scientific method" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Elements_of_...
no, it was on arxiv somewhere. It was written as a journal article.
edit: AH! it was linked upthread on bioarxiv.
JSON-LD 1.0: A JSON-Based Serialization for Linked Data
JSON-LD 1.1 https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/
"Changes since 1.0 Recommendation of 16 January 2014" https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/#changes-from-10
Jeff Hawkins Is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research
Cortical column: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_column
> In the neocortex 6 layers can be recognized although many regions lack one or more layers, fewer layers are present in the archipallium and the paleopallium.
What this means in terms of optimal artificial neural network architecture and parameters will be interesting to learn about; in regards to logic, reasoning, and inference.
According to "Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.0004... , the human brain appears to be [at most] 11-dimensional (11D); in terms of algebraic topology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_topology
Relatedly,
"Study shows how memories ripple through the brain" https://www.ninds.nih.gov/News-Events/News-and-Press-Release...
> The [NeuroGrid] team was also surprised to find that the ripples in the association neocortex and hippocampus occurred at the same time, suggesting the two regions were communicating as the rats slept. Because the association neocortex is thought to be a storage location for memories, the researchers theorized that this neural dialogue could help the brain retain information.
Re: Topological graph theory [1], is it possible to embed a graph on a space filling curve [2] (such as a Hilbert R-tree [3])?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_graph_theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_R-tree
[4] https://github.com/bup/bup (git packfiles)
Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
It's too bad we're not ready to launch probes to visit and explore such transient objects at a moment's notice.
I think it would make sense to plan a probe mission where the probe would be put into storage to stand by for these kind of events. It would still be a challenge and might be impossible to find a launch window and reach the passing object in time, but it would be worth trying.
Just imagine how tragic it would be, if an ancient artifact of an alien civilization drifts by earth and we don't manage to have at least a look at it.
Wouldn’t such an object be emitting radio signals that earth could receive?
Not if it's something like another civilization's Tesla Roadster.
> Not if it's something like another civilization's Tesla Roadster.
'Oumuamua is red and headed toward Pegasus (the winged horse) after a very long journey starting longtime in spacetime ago. It is wildly tumbling off-kilter and potentially creating a magnetic field that would be useful for interplanetary spacetravel.
They're probably pointing us to somewhere else from somewhere else.
If this is any indication of the state of another civilization's advanced physics, and it missed us by a wide margin, they're probably laughing at our energy and water markets; and indicating that we should be focused on asteroid impact avoidance (and then we will really laugh about rockets and red electromagnetic kinetic energy machines and asteroid mining). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
"Amateurs"
[We watch it fly by, heads all turning]
Maybe it would've been better to have put alone starman in the passenger seat or two starpeoples total?
Given the skull shape of October 2015 TB145 [1] (due to return in November 2018), maybe 'Oumuamua [2] is a pathology of Mars and an acknowledgement of our spacefaring intentions? Red, subsurface water, disrupted magnetic field.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_TB145
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua
In regards to a red, unshielded, earth vehicle floating in solar orbit with a suited anthropomorphic creature whose head is too big for the windshield:
"What happened here?"
Publishing more data behind our reporting
Publishing raw data itself is definitely a good start but there also needs to be a push towards a standardized way of sharing data along with it's lineage (dependent sources, experimental design/generation process, metadata, graph relationship of other uses, etc.).
> Publishing raw data itself is definitely a good start but there also needs to be a push towards a standardized way of sharing data along with it's lineage (dependent sources, experimental design/generation process, metadata, graph relationship of other uses, etc.).
Linked Data based on URIs is reusable. ( https://5stardata.info )
The Schema.org Health and Life Sciences extension is ahead of the game here, IMHO. MedicalObservationalStudy and MedicalTrial are subclasses of https://schema.org/MedicalStudy . {DoubleBlindedTrial, InternationalTrial, MultiCenterTrial, OpenTrial, PlaceboControlledTrial, RandomizedTrial, SingleBlindedTrial, SingleCenterTrial, and TripleBlindedTrial} are subclasses of schema.org/MedicalTrial.
A schema.org/MedicalScholarlyArticle (a subclass of https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle ) can have a https://schema.org/Dataset. https://schema.org/hasPart is the inverse of https://schema.org/isPartOf .
More structured predicates which indicate the degree to which evidence supports/confirms or disproves current and other hypotheses (according to a particular Person or Persons on a given date and time; given a level of scrutiny of the given information) are needed.
In regards to epistemology, there was some work on Fact Checking ( e.g. https://schema.org/ClaimReview ) in recent times. To quote myself here, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15528824 :
> In terms of verifying (or validating) subjective opinions, correlational observations, and inferences of causal relations; #LinkedMetaAnalyses of documents (notebooks) containing structured links to their data as premises would be ideal. Unfortunately, PDF is not very helpful in accomplishing that objective (in addition to being a terrible format for review with screen reader and mobile devices): I think HTML with RDFa (and/or CSVW JSONLD) is our best hope of making at least partially automated verification of meta analyses a reality.
"#LinkedReproducibility"; "#LinkedMetaAnalyses", "#StudyGraph"
CSV 1.1 – CSV Evolved (for Humans)
Well, if you want to improve tabular data formats:
1. Add a version identifier / content-type on the first line!
2. Create a formal grammar for this CSV format
3. Specify preferred character-encoding
4. Provide some tooling (validation, CSV 1.1 => HTML, CSV => Excel)
5. Add the option to specify column type (string, int, date)
6. Specify ISO-8601 as the preferred date format
7. Allow 'reheading' the columns in the file itself. This is useful in streaming data.
8. Specify the format of the newlines.
CSVW: CSV on the Web https://w3c.github.io/csvw/
"CSV on the Web: A Primer" http://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/
"Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web" http://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/
"Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web" (csv2json) http://www.w3.org/TR/csv2json/
"Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web" (csv2rdf) http://www.w3.org/TR/csv2rdf/
...
N. Allow authors to (1) specify how many header rows are metadata and (2) what each row is. For example: 7 metadata header rows: {column label, property URI [path], datatype URI, unit URI, accuracy, precision, significant figures}
With URIs, we can merge, join, and concatenate data (when e.g. study control URIs for e.g. single/double/triple blinding/masking indicate that the https://schema.org/Dataset meets meta-analysis inclusion criteria).
"#LinkedReproducibility"; "#LinkedMetaAnalyses"
Ask HN: Which plants can be planted indoors and easily maintained?
Chlorophytum comosum (spider plants) are good air-filtering houseplants that are also easy to take starts of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophytum_comosum
Houseplant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houseplant
Graduate Student Solves Quantum Verification Problem
"Classical Verification of Quantum Computations" Mahadev. (2018)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01082
https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1804.01082/
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10138991277567750...
The down side to wind power
>To estimate the impacts of wind power, Keith and Miller established a baseline for the 2012‒2014 U.S. climate using a standard weather-forecasting model. Then, they covered one-third of the continental U.S. with enough wind turbines to meet present-day U.S. electricity demand. The researchers found this scenario would warm the surface temperature of the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius, with the largest changes occurring at night when surface temperatures increased by up to 1.5 degrees. This warming is the result of wind turbines actively mixing the atmosphere near the ground and aloft while simultaneously extracting from the atmosphere’s motion.
I am confused: How does the warming work exactly and is this actually a global climate effect? Because this part of the article makes it sound to me as if it's just a very localised change of temperature caused by the exchange of different air layers, which can't be right? Because you couldn't really compare that to climate change on a global scale.
The example is clearly hypothetical only. We're never going to cover one third of the continental US with wind turbines.
The more important information to me is that neither wind nor solar have the power density that has been claimed.
For wind, we found that the average power density — meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant — was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts
...
For solar energy, the average power density (measured in watts per meter squared) is 10 times higher than wind power, but also much lower than estimates by leading energy experts.
Then you have the separate problem that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, so you need a huge storage infrastructure (batteries, presumably) alongside the wind and solar generating infrastructure.
IMO nuclear is the only realistic alternative to coal to provide reliable, zero-emission "base load" power generation. Wind and solar could make sense in some use cases but not in general.
> IMO nuclear is the only realistic alternative to coal to provide reliable, zero-emission "base load" power generation. Wind and solar could make sense in some use cases but not in general.
How much heat energy does a reactor with n meters of concrete around it, located on a water supply in order to use water in an open closed loop, protected with national security resources, waste into the environment?
I'd be interested to see which power sources the authors of this study would choose as a control for these just sensational stats.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17806589 :
> Canada (2030), France (2021), and the UK (2025) are all working to entirely phase out coal-fired power plants for very good reasons (such as neonatal health).
Would you burn a charcoal grill in an enclosed space like a garage? No.
Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki
"Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer's state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.
"The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy" (2011) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10123
Landauer's principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
"Thin film converts heat from electronics into energy" (2018) http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/04/16/thin-film-converts-heat-...
> This study reports new records for pyroelectric energy conversion energy density (1.06 Joules per cubic centimeter), power density (526 Watts per cubic centimeter) and efficiency (19 percent of Carnot efficiency, which is the standard unit of measurement for the efficiency of a heat engine).
"Pyroelectric energy conversion with large energy and power density in relaxor ferroelectric thin films" (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-018-0059-8
Carnot heat engine > Carnot cycle, Carnot's theorem, "Real heat engines": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine
Carnot's theorem > Applicability to fuel cells and batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...
> Since fuel cells and batteries can generate useful power when all components of the system are at the same temperature [...], they are clearly not limited by Carnot's theorem, which states that no power can be generated when [...]. This is because Carnot's theorem applies to engines converting thermal energy to work, whereas fuel cells and batteries instead convert chemical energy to work.[6] Nevertheless, the second law of thermodynamics still provides restrictions on fuel cell and battery energy conversion
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Is there enough heat energy from a datacenter to -- rather than heating oceans (which can result in tropical storms) -- turn a turbine (to convert heat energy back into electrical energy)?
Is there a statistic which captures the amount of heat energy discharged into ocean/river/lake water? "100% clean energy with PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements)" while bleeding energy into the oceans isn't quite representative of the total system.
"How to Reuse Waste Heat from Data Centers Intelligently" (2016) https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/05/10/how-...
> There are two big issues with data center waste heat reuse: the relatively low temperatures involved and the difficulty of transporting heat. Many of the reuse applications to date have used the low-grade server exhaust heat in an application physically adjacent to the data center, such as a greenhouse or swimming pool in the building next door. This is reasonable given the relatively low temperatures of data center return air, usually between 28° and 35°C (80-95°F), and the difficulty in moving heat around. Moving heat energy frequently requires insulated ducting or plumbing instead of cheap, convenient electrical cables. Trenching and installation to run a hot water pipe from a data center to a heat user may cost as much as $600 per linear foot. Just the piping to share heat with a facility one-quarter mile away might add $750,000 or more to a data center construction project. There’s currently not much that can be done to reduce this cost.
> To address the low-temperature issue, some data center operators have started using heat pumps to increase the temperature of waste heat, making the thermal energy much more valuable, and marketable. Waste heat coming out of heat pumps at temperatures in the range of 55° to 70°C (130-160°F) can be transferred to a liquid medium for easier transport and can be used in district heating, commercial laundry, industrial process heat, and many more. There are even High Temperature (HT) and Very High Temperature (VHT) heat pumps capable of moving low-grade data center heat up to 140°C.
Heat Pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
"Data Centers That Recycle Waste Heat" https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-centers-that-recycl...
Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
> Also, to foster research on this topic we have built a wiki, combining lists of papers, websites, events pages, etc. We highly encourage people to visit it, sign up, and start improving it; the more scientists get involved, from the more fields, the better!
Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki https://centre.santafe.edu/thermocomp/Santa_Fe_Institute_Col...
Justice Department Sues to Stop California Net Neutrality Law
Sorry if I get some basic understanding of the law wrong but...
Isn't this the same thing as regulating car emissions? Doesn't 822 only apply to providers in the state itself? Wouldn't it be that the telecoms are welcome to engage in another method of end-customer billing in other states?
What am I missing?
> Like California’s auto emissions laws that forced automakers to adopt the standards for all production, the state’s new net neutrality rules could push broadband providers to apply the same rules to other states.
I think you're right, the motives are very similar.
> Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that California’s net neutrality law was illegal because Congress granted the federal government, through the F.C.C., the sole authority to create rules for broadband internet providers. “States do not regulate interstate commerce — the federal government does,” Mr. Sessions said in a statement.
I thought Republicans were pro-states rights and limited government? How does their position on this jive with their ideology?
Expansion of federal jurisdiction under the Commerce Clause is an egregious violation of Constitutional law.
Does the federal government have the enumerated right under the Commerce Clause to, for example, ban football for anyone that doesn't have a disability? No!
Was the Commerce Clause sufficient authorization for Federal prohibition of alcohol? No! An Amendment to the Constitution was necessary. And, Federal Alcohol and the unequal necessary State Alcohol prohibitions miserably failed to achieve the intended outcomes.
Where is the limit? How can they claim to support a states' rights, limited government position while expanding jurisdiction under the Interstate Commerce Clause? "Substantially affecting" interstate commerce is a very slippery slope.
Furthermore, de-classification from Title II did effectively - as the current administration's FCC very clearly argued (in favor of special interests over those of the majority) - relieve the FCC of authority to regulate ISPs: they claimed that it's FTC's job and now they're claiming it's their job.
Without Title II classification, FCC has no authority to preempt state net neutrality regulation. California and Washington have the right to regulate ISPs within their respective states.
Outrageous!
Limited government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_government
States' rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights
[Interstate] Commerce Clause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
Net neutrality in the United States > Repeal of net neutrality policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United...
The limit is established, and constantly reevaulated by the Supreme Court. For example it was held that gun control cannot be done through the Commerce Clause.
Car emissions and ISPs are different. As ISPs are very much perfect examples of truly local things (they need to reach your devices with EM signals either via cables or air radio), the Federal government might try to argue that the net neutrality regulation of California affects the whole economy substantially, because it allows too much interstate competition due to the lack of bundling/throttling by ISPs.
Similarly, the problem with car emissions might be that requiring thing at the time of sale affects what kind of cars are sold to CA.
Is the Commerce Clause too vague? Yes. Is there a quick and sane way to fix it? I see none. Is it at least applied consistently? Well, sort of. But we shall see.
ISPs are the very opposite of local, as the only reason I have an ISP is to deliver bits from the rest of the world. Of course, the FCC doesn't seem to understand that...
To summarize the points made in [1]: products can be sold across state lines, internet service sold in one state cannot be sold across state lines.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111651
In my opinion, the court has significantly erred in redefining interstate commerce to include (1) intrastate-only-commerce; and (2) non-commerce (i.e. locally grown and unsold wheat)
Furthermore - and this is a bit off topic - unalienable natural rights (Equality, Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness) are of higher precedence. I mention this because this is yet another case where the court will be interpreting the boundary between State and Federal rights; and it's very clear that the founders intended for the powers of the federal government to be limited -- certainly not something that the Commerce Clause should be interpreted to supersede.
What penalties and civil fines are appropriate for States or executive branch departments that violate the Constitution; for failure to uphold Oaths to uphold the Constitution?
The problem is, someone has to interpret what kind of economy the Founders intended.
Is it okay if a State opts to withdraw from the interstate market for wheat? Because without power to meddle with intra-state production, consumption and transactions, it's entirely possible.
White House Drafts Order to Probe Google, Facebook Practices
This sounds like they want the equal representation policies that the Republican Party got rolled back in the 80s (ruled unconstitutional iirc). It’s what allowed the rise of partisan “news”. It seems like any “equal exposure” policies would hit the same issues.
That said the primary “imbalanced exposure” seems to be due to evicting people who simply spend their time attacking minorities, attack equal rights, and promoting violence towards anyone that they dislike. For whatever reason the Republican Party seems to have decided that those people represent “conservative” views that private companies should have to support.
i. e. : People who are exercising their right to free speech.
'Right to free speech' does not exist outside the government. It never has, unless there's an amendment to the first amendment that no one is telling us about..
Repeating what I said in an earlier comment....they were able to grow to the size they have become because they are exempted from liable laws under safe harbor. The argument for that was that they were neutral platforms. They no longer are so they either need to remove the protections or be subject to the first amendment but they should not be able to have it both ways.....and I don't think there is case law to back this one way or the other yet...
> they were able to grow to the size they have become because they are exempted from liable laws under safe harbor
This was not a selective protection. When the government grants limited resources like electromagnetic spectrum and right of way, they're not directly making a monopoly, but the FCC does then claim right to regulate speech.
In the interest of fairness, the FCC classed telecommunication service providers as common carriers; thus authorizing FCC to pass net neutrality protections which require equal prioritization of internet traffic. (No blocking, No throttling, No paid prioritization). The current administration doesn't feel that that's fair, and so they've moved to dismantle said "burdensome regulations".
The current administration is now apparently attempting to argue that information service providers - which are all equally granted safe harbor and obligated to comply with DMCA - have no right to take down abuse and harassment because anti-trust monopoly therefore Freedom of Speech doesn't apply to these corporation persons.
Selective bias, indeed! Broadcast TV and Radio are subject to different rules than Cable (non-broadcast) TV.
Other regimes have attempted to argue that the government has the right to dictate the media as well.
Taking down abuse and harassment is necessary and well within the rights of a person and a corporation in the United States. Taking down certain content is now legally required within 24 hours of notice from the government in the EU.
Where is the line between a media conglomerate that produces news entertainment and an information service provider? If there is none, and the government has the right to regulate "equal time" on non-granted-spectrum media outlets, future administrations could force ConservativeNewsOutletZ and LiberalNewsOutletZ to carry specific non-emergency content, to host abusive and offense rhetoric, and to be sued for being forced to do so because no safe harbor.
Can anyone find the story of how the GOP strongarmed and intimidated Facebook into "equal time" (and then we were all shoved full of apparently Russian conservative "fake news" propaganda) before the most recent election where the GOP won older radio, TV, and print voters and young people didn't vote because it appeared to be unnecessary?
Meanwhile, the current administration rolled back the "burdensome regulation" that was to prevent ISPs from selling complete internet usage history; regardless of age.
Maybe there's an exercise that would be helpful for understanding the "corporate media filter" and the "social media filter"?
You, having no money -- while watching corporate profits soar and income inequality grow to unprecedented heights -- will choose to take a job that requires you to judge whether thousands of reported pieces of content a day are abusive, harassing, making specific threats, inciting specific destructive acts, recruiting for hate groups, depicting abuse; or just good 'ol political disagreement over issues, values, and the appropriate role of the punishing and/or nurturing state. You will do this for weeks or months, because that's your best option, because nobody else is standing in the mirror behind these people who haven't learned to respectfully disagree over facts and data (evidence).
Next, you will plan segments of content time interspersed with ads paid for by people who are trying to sell their products, grow their businesses, and reach people. You will use a limited amount of our limited electromagnetic spectrum which the government has sold your corporate overlords for a limited period of time, contingent upon your adherence to specific and subjective standards of decency as codified in the stated regulations.
In both cases, your objective is to maximize profit for shareholders.
Your target audiences may vary from undefined (everyone watching), to people who only want to review fun things that they agree with in their safe little microcosm of the world, to people who know how to find statistics like corporate profits, personal savings rate, infant morality, healthcare costs per capita, and other Indicators identified as relevant to the Targets and Goals found in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals Indicators).
Do you control what the audience shares?
Ask HN: Books about applying the open source model to society
I've been thinking for some time now that as productivity keeps growing, not all people will need to work any more. Society will eventually start to resemble an open source project where a few core contributors do the real work (and get to decide the direction), some others help around, and the majority of people just benefit without having to do anything. I'm wondering if any books have been written to explore this concept further?
> I've been thinking for some time now that as productivity keeps growing, not all people will need to work any more.
How much energy do autotrophs and heterotrophs need to thrive?
"But then we'll be rewarding laziness!"
Some people do enjoy the work they've chosen to do. We enjoy the benefits of upward mobility here in the US; the land of opportunity.
Why would I fully retire at 65 (especially if lifespan extension really is in reach)?
> Society will eventually start to resemble an open source project where a few core contributors do the real work (and get to decide the direction), some others help around, and the majority of people just benefit without having to do anything.
Open-source governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance
Free-rider problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
As we continue to reward work, the people who are investing in the means of production (energy, labor, automation, raw materials) and science (research and development; education) continue to amass wealth and influence.
This concentration of wealth -- wealth inequality -- has historically presaged and portended unrest.
How contributions to open source projects are reinforced, what motivates people who choose to contribute (altruism, enlightened self interest, compassion, acceptance,), and what makes a competitive and thus sustainable open source project is an interesting study.
... Business models for open-source software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
... Political Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_science
... National currencies are valued in FOREX markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market
> I'm wondering if any books have been written to explore this concept further?
"The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" (2005) contains a number of extrapolated predictions; chief among these is that there will continue to be exponential growth in technological change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
... Until we reach limits; e.g. the carrying capacity of our ecosystem, the edge of the universe.
"The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
"Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" (2010) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781927
Who owns what and who 'gets to' just chill while the solar robots brush their teeth? Heady questions. "Tired yet?"
The Aragon Project has a really interesting take on open source governance:
""" IMAGINE A NATION WITHOUT LAND AND BORDERS
A digital jurisdiction
> Aragon Network will be the first community governed decentralized organization whose goal is to act as a digital jurisdiction, an online decentralized court system that isn’t bound by traditional artificial barriers such as national jurisdictions or the borders of a single country.
Aragon organizations can be upgraded seamlessly using our aragonOS architecture. They can solve disputes between two parties by using the decentralized court system, a digital jurisdiction that operates only online and utilizes your peers to resolve issues.
The Aragon Network Token, ANT, puts the power into the hands of the people participating in the operation of the Network. Every single aspect of the Network will be governed by those willing to make an effort for a better future. """
Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back
Here's a quote from this excellent article:
> An error rate of even one percent will still mean tens of millions of acts of arbitrary censorship, every day.
And a redundant -- positively defiant -- link and page title:
"Today, Europe Lost The Internet. Now, We Fight Back." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-inte...
Firms with 50 or less employees should stay that small, really.
VPN providers in North and South America FTW.
> VPN providers in North and South America FTW.
Article 13 will affect the entire Internet, not just people in Europe. Most people on the Internet use large, multinational platforms. Those platforms will set rules according to the lowest common denominator, because it's the easiest to implement.
This means that people all over the world are going to have a much more difficult time with any user-generated content. That's true even for user-created content, even if there is no other copyright holder involved (look at how badly Content ID has played out).
Or they just stop doing business in Europe.
Since europe is a quite big market, maybe not an option and easier to geolocate and restrict just EU-Traffic
Or just not, if there's no nexus to europe. I suspect for a small business, the right thing to do would be to simply ignore EU directives. I would not be surprised if the US passes a law to make judgements against US companies without a European nexus (users in Europe would not count) unenforceable in the US. That was done with the SPEECH act to stop libel tourism.
Technically, the phrase "Useful Arts and Sciences" in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution applies to just that; the definitions of which have coincidentally changed over the years.
The harms to Freedom of Speech -- i.e. impossible 99% accuracy in content filtering still results in far too much censorship -- so significantly outweigh the benefits for a limited number of special interests intending to thwart inferior American information services which also currently host "art" and content pertaining to the "useful arts"; that it's hard to believe this new policy will have it's intended effects.
Haven't there been multiple studies which show that free marketing from e.g. content piracy -- people who experience and recommended said goods at $0 -- is actually a net positive for the large corporate entertainment industry? That, unimpeded, content spreads like the common cold through word of mouth; resulting in greater number of artful impressions.
How can they not anticipate de-listing of EU content from news and academic article aggregators as an outcome of these new policies? (Resulting in even greater outsized impact on one possible front page that consumers can choose to consume)
For countries in the EU with less than 300 million voters, if you want:
- time for your headline: $
- time for your snippet: $$
- time for your og:description: $$
- free video hosting: $$$
- video revenue: $$$$
- < 30% American content: $$$$$
Pay your bill.
And what of academic article aggregators? Can they still index schema:ScholarlyArticle titles and provide a value-added information service for science?
Consumer science (a.k.a. home economics) as a college major
> That's why we need to bring back the old home economics class. Call it "Skills for Life" and make it mandatory in high schools. Teach basic economics along with budgeting, comparison shopping, basic cooking skills and time management.
Some Jupyter notebooks for these topics that work with https://mybinder.org could be super helpful. A self-paced edX course could also be a great intro to teaching oneself though online learning.
* Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
* Food Science (nutrition, meal planning for n people, food prep safety, how long certain things can safely be left out on the counter)
* Productivity Skills (GTD, context switching overhead, calendar, email labels, memo app / shared task lists)
There were FACS (Family and Consumer Studies/Sciences) courses in our middle and high school curricula. Nutrition, cooking, sewing; family planning, carry a digital baby for awhile
Home economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics
* Family planning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning
> * Personal Finance (budgets, interest, growth, inflation, retirement)
Personal Finance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finance
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more > Personal finance https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/personal-fi...
"CS 007: Personal Finance For Engineers" https://cs007.blog
https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki
> * Food Science (nutrition, meal planning for n people, food prep safety, how long certain things can safely be left out on the counter)
Food Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_science
Dietary management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_management
Nutrition Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition_Education
MyPlate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyPlate
Healthy Eating Plate https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...
How to make salads, smoothies, sandwiches
How to compost and avoid unnecessary packaging
* School, College, Testing, "How Children Learn"
GED, SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT, ASVAB
Defending a Thesis, Bar Exam, Boards
Khan Academy > College, careers, and more https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
Educational Testing https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/educational-testing
529 Plans (can be used for qualifying educational expenses for any person) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/529_plan
Middle School "Glimpse" project: Past, Present, Future. Present, Future: plan your 4-year highschool course plan, pick 3 careers, pick 3 colleges (and how much they cost)
High school literature: write a narrative essay for college admissions
* Health and Medicine
How to add emergency contact and health information to your phone, carseat (ICE: In Case of Emergency)
How to get health insurance ( https://healthcare.gov/ )
"What's your blood type?" (?!)
Khan Academy > Science > Health and Medicine https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine
Facebook vows to run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2020
Miami Will Be Underwater Soon. Its Drinking Water Could Go First
Now, now, let's focus on the positives here:
- more pollution from shipping routes through the Arctic circle (and yucky-looking icebergs that tourists don't like)
- less beachfront property
- more desalinatable water
- hotter heat
- more revulsive detestable significant others (displaced global unrest)
- costs of responding to natural disasters occurring with greater frequency due to elevated ocean temperatures
- less parking spaces (!)
What are the other costs and benefits here?
I've received a number of downvotes for this comment. I think it's misunderstood, and that's my fault: I should have included [sarcasm] around the whole comment [/sarcasm].
I've written about our need to address climate change here in past comments. I think the administration's climate change denials (see: "climate change politifact') and regulatory rollbacks are beyond despicable: they're sabotaging the United States by allowing more toxic chemicals into the environment that we all share, and allowing more sites that must be protected with tax dollars that aren't there because these industries pay far less than benchmarks in terms of effective tax rate. We know that vehicle emissions, mercury, and coal ash are toxic: why would we allow people to violate the rights of others in that way?
A person could voluntarily consume said toxic byproducts and not have violated their own rights or the rights of others, you understand. There's no medical value and low potential for abuse, so we just sit idly by while they're violating the rights of other people by dumping toxic chemicals into the environment that are both poisonous and strongly linked to climate change.
What would help us care about this? A sarcastic list of additional reasons that we should care? No! Miami underwater during tourist season is enough! I've had enough!
So, my mistake here - my downvote-earning mistake - was dropping my generally helpful, hopeful tone for cynicism and sarcasm that wasn't motivating enough.
We need people to regulate pollution in order to prevent further costs of climate change. Water in the streets holds up commerce, travel, hampers national security, and destroys the road.
We must stop rewarding pollution if we want it - and definitely resultant climate change - to stop. What motivates other people to care?
Free hosting VPS for NGO project?
The Burden: Fossil Fuel, the Military and National Security
Here's a link to the video: https://vimeo.com/194560636
Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise
The actual document title: "Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 drafted by the Group of independent scientists: Invited background document on economic transformation, to chapter: Transformation: The Economy" (2018) https://bios.fi/bios-governance_of_economic_transition.pdf [PDF]
Why I distrust command economies (beyond just because of our experiences with violent fascism and defense overspending and the subsequent failures of various communist regimes):
We have elections today. We don't choose to elect people that regard the environment (our air, water, land, and other natural resources) as our most important focus. A command economy driven by these folks for longer than a term limit would be even more disastrous.
The market does not solve for 'externalities': things that aren't costed in. We must have regulation to counteract the blind optimization for profit (and efficiency) which capitalism rewards most.
Environmental regulation is currently insufficient; worldwide. That is the consensus from the Paris Agreement which 195 countries signed in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
Maybe incentives?
We could sell tokens for how much pollutants we're allowed to f### everyone else over with and penalize exceeding the amount we've purchased. That would incentivize firms to pollute less so that they can save money by having to buy fewer tokens. (Europe does this already; and it's still not going to save the planet from industrial production externalities)
So, while I'm wary of any suggestion that a command economy would somehow bring forth talent in governance, I look to this article for actionable suggestions that penalize and/or incentivize sustainable business and living practices.
Sustainable reporting really is a must: how can I design an investment portfolio that excludes reckless, irresponsible, indifferent, and careless investments and highly values sustainability?
No one likes to be driven by harsh penalties; everyone likes to be rewarded (even with carrots as incentives).
Markets do not solve for long term outcomes. Case in point: the market has not chosen the most energy efficient cryptocurrencies. Is this an information asymmetry issue: people just don't know, or just don't care because the incentives are so alluring, the brand is so strong, or the perceived security assurances of the network outweighs the energy use (and environmental impact) in comparison to dry cleaning and fossil fuel transport.
How would a command economy respond to this? It really is denial and delusion to think that the market will cast aside less energy efficient solutions in order to save the environment all on its own.
So, what do we do?
Do we incentivize getting inefficient vehicles off of the road and into a recycling plant where they belong?
Do we shut down major sources of pollution (coal plants, vehicle emissions)?
Do we create tokens to account for pollution allowances (for carbon and other toxic f###ing chemicals)?
Do we cut irrational subsidies for industries that don't pay their taxes (even when they make money); so that we're aware of the actual costs of our behavior?
Do we grow hemp to absorb carbon, clean up the soil, replace emissions, and store energy?
Who's in the mood to dom these greedy shortsighted idiots into saving themselves and preventing the violation of our right to health (life)? No, you can't because you're busy violating your own rights and finding drugs/druggies and that's not allowed? Is that a lifetime position?
"Go burn a charcoal grill and your gas vehicle in your closed garage for awhile and come talk to me." That's really what we're dealing with here.
Anyways, this paper raises some good points; although I have my doubts about command economies.
[strikethrough] You can't do that to yourself. [/strikethrough] You can't do that to others (even if you pay for their healthcare afterwards).
Where's Captain Planet when you need 'em, anyways?
The problem may actually be solved by a free market... But it has to have different optimizations.
"Value" or "Quality" of a company has to stop being measured in unconstrained growth and instead measured in minimized externalities, while achieving your stated goal.
Accounting has to become a hell of a lot more complicated. We're talking "keep track of your industrial waste product", possibly even having to take responsibility in some manner for dealing with it directly.
There also needs to be some societal change as well. We need to Look at how we've stretched our supply and industry chains worldwide and start to figure out ways to minimize transportation and production costs.
Competition may need to fundamentally change it's nature as well. Trade secrets need to be ripped out into the light of day. It's not a contest of out doing the other guy, but to see who can find a way to make the entire industry more efficient.
Definitely a lot of change needed. That is for sure.
Firefox Nightly Secure DNS Experimental Results
> The experiment generated over a billion DoH transactions and is now closed. You can continue to manually enable DoH on your copy of Firefox Nightly if you like.
...
> Using HTTPS with a cloud service provider had only a minor performance impact on the majority of non-cached DNS queries as compared to traditional DNS. Most queries were around 6 milliseconds slower, which is an acceptable cost for the benefits of securing the data. However, the slowest DNS transactions performed much better with the new DoH based system than the traditional one – sometimes hundreds of milliseconds better.
Long-sought decay of Higgs boson observed at CERN
Furthermore, both teams measured a rate for the decay that is consistent with the Standard Model prediction, within the current precision of the measurement.
And now everyone: Noooo, not again.
(Explanation: it's well-known that the Standard Model can't be completely correct but again and again physicists fail to find an experiment contradicting its predictions, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo... for example)
Well, the standard model can be correct. It is correct until some experiment proves otherwise.
It is full of unexplained hadcoded parameters, indeed, which need an explanation from outside of the SM.
> It is full of unexplained hadcoded parameters, indeed, which need an explanation from outside of the SM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)#Unn...
> The term magic number or magic constant refers to the anti-pattern of using numbers directly in source code
Who is going to request changes when doing a code review on a pull request from God?
But which branch do you pull from? God has been forked so many times, it's hard to keep track. There are several distros available, so I guess you just get to pick the one that checks the most of your needs at the time.
Sen. Wyden Confirms Cell-Site Simulators Disrupt Emergency Calls
Building a Model for Retirement Savings in Python
re: pulling historical data with pandas-datareader, backtesting, algorithmic trading: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/7zxptg/pulling_stoc...
re: historical returns
- [The article uses a constant 7% annual return rate]
- "The current average annual return from 1923 (the year of the S&P’s inception) through 2016 is 12.25%." https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/the-12-reality (but that doesn't account for inflation)
- https://www.quantopian.com/posts/56b62019a4a36a79da000059 (300%+ over n years (from a down market))
Is there a Jupyter notebook with this code (with a requirements.txt for https://mybinder.org (repo2docker))?
New E.P.A. Rollback of Coal Pollution Regulations Takes a Major Step Forward
Would you move your family downwind from a coal plant? Why or why not?
Coal ash pollutes air, water, rain (acid rain), crops (our food), and soil. Which rights of victims does coal pollution infringe? Who is liable for the health effects?
Canada (2030), France (2021), and the UK (2025) are all working to entirely phase out coal-fired power plants for very good reasons (such as neonatal health).
~"They're just picking on coal": No, we're choosing renewables that are lower cost AND don't make workers and citizens sick.
If you can mine for coal, you can set up solar panels and wind turbines.
If you can run a coal mine; you can buy some cheap land, put up solar panels and wind turbines, and connect it to the grid.
Researchers Build Room-Temp Quantum Transistor Using a Single Atom
"Quasi-Solid-State Single-Atom Transistors" (2018) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201801...
New “Turning Tables” Technique Bypasses All Windows Kernel Mitigations
Um – Create your own man pages so you can remember how to do stuff
Interesting project. I believe these two shell functions in the shell's initialization file (~/.profile, ~/.bashrc, etc.) can serve as a poor man's um:
umedit() { mkdir -p ~/notes; vim ~/notes/"$1.txt"; }
um() { less ~/notes/"$1.txt"; }If you write these in .rst, you can generate actual manpages with Sphinx: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/configuration.html...
sphinx.builders.manpage: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/_modules/sphinx/builders...
[deleted]
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Extremely interesting take, with a lot of good stuff to think about.
I'm unclear about the claim that less economic growth would be better, though, and the author seems very committed to it. I wasn't able to find the article they reference as explaining how less growth is what we really need (J.W. Forrester, World Dynamics, Portland OR, Productivity Press, 1971), and it comes from almost 50 years ago, which might as well be another economic era altogether.
Does anyone know what the arguments are, what assumptions they require, and whether they still apply today? My understanding is that "less growth is better" is a distinctly minority take amongst modern economists, but the rest of this article seems very intelligently laid out, so I'd like to dig deeper.
I've always thought that for any dial we have, there's always an optimal setting, whether it's tax rates, growth rates, birth rates, etc., and blindly pushing one way or the other (like both political parties tend to do) is not helpful, or at the very least merely indicates different value systems.
The book is called "limits to growth", and it's a work of the Club of Rome. You can watch this video to have an idea of their work [1]. At first it's a very strange idea, afterall we work and consume everyday in order to grow the economy. But every healthy system as a homeostastic point, a point where it doesn't need to grow, only to be maintained. We are now a fat society and we need to get our health back, we need to degrow. We need to work much less hours and consume much less. Reducing working hours is a great leverage point. People will start to have time to care about the community, and take care of their own health. Maybe have more time to take a walk instead of using the car. This can improve health and environment but will not contribute to economic growth, healthy people that don't use cars are not good friends of economic growth based on GDP. English is not my mother language, Ursula Le Guin had an eloquent post about this on her blog, but was removed to be on the last book. The post is called "Clinging to a Metaphor" (the metaphor is economic growth) and the book is called "No Time to Spare". [1] https://youtu.be/kz9wjJjmkmc
"The Limits to Growth" (1972) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
"Thinking in Systems: a Primer" (2008) https://g.co/kgs/B71ebC
Glossary of systems theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_systems_theory
Systems Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
...
Computational Thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking
Which of the #GlobalGoals (UN Sustainable Development Goals) Targets and Indicators are primary leverage points for ensuring - if not growth - prosperity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
SQLite Release 3.25.0 adds support for window functions
https://www.windowfunctions.com is a good introduction to window functions.
Besides that, the comprehensive testing and evaluation of SQLite never ceases to amaze me. I'm usually hesitant to call software development "engineering", but SQLite is definitely well-engineered.
This looks great, but I couldn't get through the first question on aggregate functions. Are there any SQL books/tutorials that go over things like this?
A lot of material I've seen has been like the classic image of "How to draw an owl. First draw two circles, then draw the rest of the owl", where they tell you the super basic stuff, then assume you know everything.
Ibis uses windowing functions for aggregations if the database supports them. IDK when support for the new SQLite support will be implemented? http://docs.ibis-project.org/sql.html#window-functions
[EDIT]
I created an issue for this here: https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis/issues/1597
Update on the Distrust of Symantec TLS Certificates
Is the certifi bundle (2018.8.13) on PyPI also updated? https://pypi.org/project/certifi/
https://github.com/certifi/certifi.io/issues/18
> Are these still in the bundle?
> Should projects like requests which depend on certifi also implement this logic?
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3
Academic Torrents – Making 27TB of research data available
All the .torrent files are served over http so with a simple MITM attack a bad actor could swap in their own custom tweaked version of any data set here in order to achieve whatever goals that might serve for the bad actor's interests.
I really wish we could get basic security concepts added to the default curriculum for grade schoolers. You shouldn't need a PhD in computer security to know this stuff. These site creators have PhDs in other fields, but obviously no concept of security. This stuff should be basic literacy for everyone.
> This stuff should be basic literacy for everyone.
Arguably, one compromised PKI x.509 CA jeopardizes all SSL/TLS channel sec if there's no certificate pinning and an alternate channel for distributing signed cert fingerprints (cryptographically signed hashes).
We could teach blockchain and cryptocurrency principles: private/secret key, public key, hash verification; there there's money on the table.
GPG presumes secure key distribution (`gpg --verify .asc`).
TUF is designed to survive certain role key compromises. https://theupdateframework.github.io
1/0 = 0
1/0 = 1(±∞)
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/960508624849244160
> How many times does zero go into any number? Infinity. [...]
> How many times does zero go into zero? infinity^2?
Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially.
However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy).
Allow me to give an example: currently we have a drought in Belgium (or at least Flanders). We are not landlocked, there is plenty of water in the sea. Desalination is energy intensive. Instead of only looking at energy storage, why can't we increase the processing capacity (more desalination sites capable of working in parallel), and desalinate say sea water during the energy flood? I don't expect this to be an ideal real world example, only a pattern for identifying such examples: any product (could be composite parts, or bulk material) which is relatively compact and has some high energy per product volume processinng step. Just do the process (desalination, welding some part to another part...) when the sun shines, and store them for later.
Products with very high step energy density are good candidates for storing, and could help flatten daily variations, and perhaps even seasonal variations!
Now some companies would prefer avoiding risk if they don't have guaranteed orders far enough into the future, then perhaps there should be a market for insurance or loans, so that the company is encouraged to take the risk, instead of wasting the cheap energy...
Capital costs vs. marginal costs.
You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs.
(This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle)
Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs. Desalination is not one of those.
A desal plant is a useful thing and can be run around the clock off traditional energy sources. The "free energy" hours would help lower the costs.
I can even imagine a SETI-like application where people who over-generate power are able to donate it to causes of their preference...
But if you are using traditional energy sources to run it all the time, it is no longer 'solving' the problem of burning off excess energy during peak renewable times.
Someone is having to build a lot of highly wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
Rational cryptocurrency mining firms can use the excess (unstorable) energy by converting it back to money (while the sun shines and the wind blows).
Money > Energy > Money
> Someone is having to build a lot of highly wasteful, redundant infrastructure.
We're nowhere near having the energy infrastructure necessary to support everyone having an electric vehicle yet.
Energy storage is key to maximizing returns from renewables and minimizing irreversible environmental damage.
Kernels, a free hosted Jupyter notebook environment with GPUs
Hey Ben, are these going to support arbitrary CUDA?
At the moment, we're focused on providing great support for the Python and R analytics/machine learning ecosystems. We'll likely expand this in the future, and in the meantime it's possible to hack through many other usecases we don't formally support well.
How do you handle custom environment requirements, whether it’s Python version, library version, or more complex things in the environment that some code might run on?
Basically, suppose I wanted everything that I could define in a Docker container to be available “as the environment” in which the notebook is running. How do I do that?
I ask because I’ve started to see an alarming proliferation of “notebook as a service” platforms that don’t offer that type of full environment spec, if they offer any configuration of the run time environment at all.
I’ve taught probability and data science at university level and worked in machine learning in a variety of businesses too, and I’d say for literally all use cases, from the quickest little pure-pedagogy prototype of a canned Keras model to a heavily customized use case with custom-compiled TensorFlow, different data assets for testing vs ad hoc exploration vs deployment, etc., the absolutely minimum thing needed before anything can be said to offer “reproducibility” is complete specification of the run time environment and artifacts.
The trend to convince people that a little “poke around with scripts in a managed environment” offering is value-additive is dangerous, very similar to MATLAB’s approach to entwine all data exploration with the atrocious development havits that are facilitated by the console environment (and to specifically target university students with free licenses, to use a drug dealer model to get engineers hooked on MATLAB’s workflow model and use that to leverage employers to oblige by buying and standardizing on abjectly bad MATLAB products).
Any time I meet young data scientists I always try to encourage them to avoid junk like that. It’s vital to begin experiments with fully reproducible artifacts like thick archive files or containers, and to structure code into meaningful reproducible units even for your first ad hoc explorations, and to absolutely always avoid linear scripting as an exploratory technique (it is terrible and ineffective for such a task).
Kaggle Kernels seems like a cool idea, so long as the programmer must fully define artifacts that describe the complete entirety of the run time environment, and nobody is sold on the Kool Aid of just linear scripting in some other managed environment.
Each kernel for example could have a link back to a GitHub repo containing a Dockerfile and build scripts for what defined the precise environment the notebook is running in. Now that’s reproducible.
Here are the Kaggle Kernels Dockerfiles:
- Python: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-python/blob/master/Dockerfi...
- R: https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-rstats/blob/master/Dockerfi...
https://mybinder.org builds containers (and launches free cloud instances) on demand with repo2docker from a (commit hash, branch, or tag) repo URL: https://repo2docker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config_files.ht...
That’s a great first step! Adding the ability to customize on a per-notebook basis would be impressive.
Solar and wind are coming. And the power sector isn’t ready
I don't know that fatalism and hopelessness are motivating for decision makers (who are seeking greater margins regardless of policy and lobbies).
Is our transformation to 100% clean energy ASAP a certain eventuality? On a long enough timescale, it would be irrational for utilities to not choose both lower cost and more sustainable environmental impact ('price-rational', 'environment-rational').
We should expect storage and generation costs to continue to fall as we realize even just the current pipeline of capitalizable [storage] research.
Solar energy is free.
Solar Just Hit a Record Low Price in the U.S
Relevant bits:
> “On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”
> There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”
(emphasis mine)
>> Relevant bits:
>> “On their face, they’re less than a third the price of building a new coal or natural gas power plant,” Ramez Naam, an energy expert and lecturer at Singularity University, told Earther in an email. “In fact, building these plants is cheaper than just operating an existing coal or natural gas plant.”
>> There’s a 30 percent federal investment tax credit for solar projects that helps drive down the cost of this and other solar projects. But Naam said even if you take away that credit, “these bids, un-subsidized, are still cheaper than any new coal or gas plants, and possibly cheaper than operating existing plants.”
I'm assuming that's without factoring in the health cost externalities.
Yes, this is solely for cost of power. The healthcare savings and quality of life improvements are an additional bonus on top of very cheap power.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/air-pollution-triggering... (Air pollution is triggering diabetes in 3.2 million people each year)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-... (The Other Reason to Shift away from Coal: Air Pollution That Kills Thousands Every Year)
Causal Inference Book
Causal inference (Causal reasoning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_reasoning )
Tim Berners-Lee is working a platform designed to re-decentralize the web
Does anyone have some links on Solid that aren't media articles? I can't find anything, not even in Tim's homepage.
Home page: https://solid.mit.edu/
Spec: https://github.com/solid/solid-spec
Source: https://github.com/solid/solid
...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615679 ( https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-16615679 )
> ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).
> Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.
Mastodon has now supplanted GNU StatusNet.
More States Opting to 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays by Computer
edX can automate short essay grading with edx/edx-ora2 "Open Response Assessment Suite" [1] and edx/ease "Enhanced AI scoring engine" [2].
1: https://github.com/edx/edx-ora2 2: https://github.com/edx/ease
... I believe there's also a tool for peer feedback.
Peer feedback/grading on MOOCs is pretty bad in my experience. There’s too much diversity of skills, language ability, etc. And too many people who bring their own biases and mostly ignore any grading instructions.
Peer discussion and feedback are useful in things like college classes. Much less so with MOOCs.
Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course
I want to build an online course on graph algorithms for my university. I've tried to find a solution which would let submit, execute and test student's code (implement an online judge), but have had no success. There are a lot of complex LMS and none of them seem to have this feature as a basic functionality.
Are there any good out-of-box solutions? I'm sure I can build a course using Moodle or another popular LMS with some plugin, but I don't want to spend my time customizing things.
I'm interested both in platforms and self-hosted solutions. Thanks!
Maybe look at Jupyter Notebook? It does much of this out of the box, but may not be exactly what you are looking for.
nbgrader is a "A system for assigning and grading Jupyter notebooks." https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader
jupyter-edx-grader-xblock https://github.com/ibleducation/jupyter-edx-grader-xblock
> Auto-grade a student assignment created as a Jupyter notebook, using the nbgrader Jupyter extension, and write the score in the Open edX gradebook
... networkx is a graph library written in Python which has pretty good docs: https://networkx.github.io/documentation/stable/reference/
There are a few books which feature networkx.
There is now a backprop principle for deep learning on quantum computers
"A Universal Training Algorithm for Quantum Deep Learning" https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1806.09729/
New research a ‘breakthrough for large-scale discrete optimization’
Looks like it may be this paper:
"An Exponential Speedup in Parallel Running Time for Submodular Maximization without Loss in Approximation" https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1804.06355/
The ACM STOC 2018 conference links to "The Adaptive Complexity of Maximizing a Submodular Function" http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N651970 https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ericbalkanski/files/the-ad...
A DOI URI would be great, thanks.
Wind, solar farms produce 10% of US power in the first four months of 2018
Take note: 10% PRODUCED, not 10% CONSUMED.
This is counting all output by wind and solar regardless if it is needed and usable when the power is being produced. This is quite important because wind and solar are not on-demand sources of power.
> This is counting all output by wind and solar regardless if it is needed and usable when the power is being produced. This is quite important because wind and solar are not on-demand sources of power.
I think you have that backwards: in the US, we lack the ability to scale down coal and nuclear plants. Solar and Wind are generally the first to get pulled offline when generated capacity exceeds demand and storage.
TIL this is called "curtailment" and it's an argument that utilities have used to justify not spending on renewables that are saving the environment from global warming (which is going to require more electricity for air conditioning).
Solar energy production peaks around noon. Demand for electricity peaks in the evening. We need storage (batteries with supercapacitors out front) in order to store the difference between peak generation and peak use. Because they're unable to store this extra energy, they temporarily shut down solar and wind and leave the polluting plants online.
Consumers aren't exposed to daily price fluctuations: they get a flat rate that makes it easy to check their bill; so there's no price incentive to e.g. charge an EV at midday when energy is cheapest.
The 'Duck curve' shows this relation between peak supply and demand in electricity markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
Developing energy storage capabilities (through infrastructure and open access basic research that can be capitalized by all) is likely the best solution. According to a fairly recent report, we could go 100% renewable with the energy storage tech that exists today.
But there's no money for it. There's money for subsidizing oil production (regardless of harms (!)), but not so much for wind and solar. There's money for responding to natural disasters caused by global warming, but not so much for non-carbon-based energy sources that don't cause global warming. A film called "The Burden: Fossil Fuel, the Military, and National Security" quotes the actual unsubsidized price of a gallon of gasoline.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of computer workload that could be run whenever energy is cheapest ( 'energy spot instances') so that we can accelerate our migration to renewable energy sources that are saving the environment for future generations? If there were people who had strong incentives to create demand for power-efficient chips and inexpensive clean energy.
Where would be if we had continued with Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the roof of the White House (instead of constant war and meddling with competing oil production regions of the world)?
It's good to see wind and solar growing this fast this year. A chart with cost per kWhr or MWhr would be enlightening.
FDA approves first marijuana-derived drug and it may spark DEA rescheduling
Perhaps someone from the US could help me understand the federal vs state legality of cannabis in the USA?
Can a state override any federal law?
Could federal-level law enforcement theoretically charge someone in a cannabis-legal state for drug offenses?
states cannot override any federal law.
the federal government merely tolerates the semi-autonomous nature of states in order to maintain order. but the legality of the federal government's supremacy is well evolved, its power and might is extremely disproportionally higher than any collective of states, and at this point the semi-autonomous nature of states is pure fiction as the federal government can assume jurisdiction over any intra-state matter if it wanted to through its interstate commerce laws.
yes, federal level law enforcement can theoretically charge someone in a cannabis-legal state for drug offenses. this still happens. the discretion of the words of the President, the heads of the DEA and DOJ prevent the MAJORITY of it from happening and also guide the discretion of the courts and public sympathy. so right now, for the last two administrations it has not been a priority to upset the social order in cannabis-legal states. but it can still happen.
> states cannot override any federal law.
Not actually true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_(U.S._Constituti...
> not actually true
a concept which requires agreement from the federal courts themselves, who have never upheld a single argument related to this concept.
not actually what?
Selective incorporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
10th Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
> The Tenth Amendment, which makes explicit the idea that the federal government is limited to only the powers granted in the Constitution, has been declared to be a truism by the Supreme Court.
Supremacy clause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause
> The Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the supreme law of the land.[1] It provides that state courts are bound by the supreme law; in case of conflict between federal and state law, the federal law must be applied. Even state constitutions are subordinate to federal law.[2] In essence, it is a conflict-of-laws rule specifying that certain federal acts take priority over any state acts that conflict with federal law
Natural rights ('inalienable rights': Equal rights, Life, Liberty, pursuit of Happiness): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights
9th Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
> The Ninth Amendment (Amendment IX) to the United States Constitution addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. It is part of the Bill of Rights.
If the 9th Amendment recognizes any unenumerated rights of the people (with Supremacy, regardless of selective incorporation), it certainly recognizes those of the Declaration of Independence ((secession from the king ('CSA')), Equality, Life, Liberty, pursuit of Happiness), our non-binding charter which frames the entirety of the Constitutional convention
All of these things have been interpreted by the courts and their conclusion was not like yours
It is nice that you are interested in these things, but they simply cannot be read verbatim and then extrapolated to other things.
This isn't educational for anybody, this is a view that lacks all consensus and all avenues to ever garner consensus in this country.
Again, I ask you to explain how the current law grants equal rights.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401906
> We tend to have issues with Equal rights/protections: slavery, voting rights, [school] segregation. Please help us understand how to do this Equally:
>> Furthermore, (1) write a function to determine whether a given Person has a (natural inalienable) right: what information may you require? (2) write a function to determine whether any two Persons have equal rights.
Abolitionists faced similar criticism from on high.
States Can Require Internet Tax Collection, Supreme Court Rules
I have a hunch that this will, in the end, be a massive win for large retailers vs. small ones. The task of figuring out how to calculate tax for all states is more or less the same amount of work regardless of size, which means for someone like Amazon it's more or less trivial, but for a mom-and-pop store it's a major hassle.
Thankfully with Shopify it is extremely easy and straightforward to manage for my wife's small online store. Their platform does a great job properly charging taxes by state, county and city in certain situations. Then using an inexpensive plan from https://www.taxjar.com/ the entire filing and paying process is 100% automated.
In 10 minutes I was able to file and pay all the sales taxes to several state, dozens of California counties and a handful of cities that charge additional taxes on top.
So you assume. As a small business you are unlikely to be audited, but that software could easily be wrong creating a huge minefield and potential liability.
So that would be the software companies' liability. And such business practice can differentiate good ones from the bad ones. I'm seeing a new business market here even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
There is zero economic gain from more complex tax rules. Further, the software does not absolve you of liability. At best they may agree to cover it, but that's unlikely and they can also go broke if they get it wrong.
Actually, current sales tax software provided by South Dakota and other states does absolve a merchant for liability if used to calculate sales tax due.
I agree with this approach!
Actually, the federal government should oblige each member state to provide the algorithm, and sign it cryptographically and have it expire every X fixed time interval, and have signed algorithms for the current and next time interval, so that software can automatically fetch and stay up to date.
Then the "business opportunity" of navigating FUD evaporates. Currently any such enterprise charging for such a service can spend a fraction of their budget lobbying against harmonization...
Since it would be an obligation of the states to the federal government, these algorithms (provided by each member state) should be hosted on a fixed federal government site.
Time to start a petition?
This would reduce costs of tax collection for all parties.
What is the most convenient format for this layered geographic data? Are the tax district boundary polygons already otherwise available as open data? What do localities call these? Sales tax tables, sales tax database, machine-readable flat files in an open format with a common schema?
How much tax revenue should it cost to provide such a service on a national level?
States, Counties, Cities, 'Tax Zones'(?) could be required to host tax.state.us.gov or similar with something like Project Open Data JSONLD /data.json that could be aggregated and shared by a server with a URL registry, a task queue service, and a CDN service.
While the Bitcoin tax payments bill passed the Senate and House in Arizona, it was vetoed in May 2018. Seminole County in Florida now allows tax payment with crytocurrencies such as Bitcoin:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-seminole-county-florida-to...
> According to a press release, the county will begin accepting Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to pay for services, including property taxes, driver license and ID card fees, as well as tags and titles. The Seminole County Tax Collector will reportedly employ blockchain payments company BitPay, which will allow the county to receive settlement the next business day directly to its bank account in US dollars.
This could also help reduce the costs of tax collection and possibly increase the likelihood of compliance with the forthcoming tax bills!
these are all very good questions, and only a community discussion of people with the right skills and interests can draft a petition, if enough people contribute to the discussion we can make the proposal more reasonable and robust against valid criticisms... but I believe we can make this happen by just starting the discussion. We can bitch on Hacker News, or we can draft a proposal for the different government levels. The more reasonable we draft it, the higher the probability the petition will be a success. I think it wouldn't be hard to argue against this proposal that a legally enforced computation should be open source, i.e. not just the algorithm for the computation but also all the data lists and boundary polygons used in the algorithm...
Ask HN: Do you consider yourself to be a good programmer?
if not, why? how do you validate your achievements?
> For identifying strengths and weaknesses: "Programmer Competency Matrix":
> - http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
> - https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/
> - https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
Don’t read too much into that. TDD for example is not leveling up it’s an opinionated approach to development.
Automated testing is not a choice in many industries.
If you're not familiar with TDD, you haven't yet achieved that level of mastery.
There's a productivity boost to being able to change quickly without breaking things.
Is all unit/functional/integration testing and continuous integrating TDD? Is it still TDD if you write the tests after you write the function (and before you commit/merge)?
I think this competency matrix is a helpful resource. And I think that learning TDD is an important thing for a good programmer.
There is absolutely no need to follow TDD to be good at testing.
This is all unfounded conjecture: it seems easier to remember which parameter combinations may exist and need to be tested when writing the function; so "let's all write tests later" becomes a black box exercise which is indeed a helpful perspective for review, but isn't the most effective use of resources.
IMHO being convinced that there's only one true and correct methodology (TDD, Scrum, etc.) or paradigm (functional, objective, reactive programming, etc.) is a sign of being a bad programmer.
A good programmer finds common attributes and behaviors and organizes them into namespaced structs/arrays/objects with functions/methods and tests. Abstractly, which terms should we use to describe hierarchical clusters of things with information and behaviors if not those from a known software development or project management methodology?
And a good programmer asks why people might have spent so much time formalizing project development methodologies. "What sorts of product (team) failures are we dealing with here?" is an expensive question to answer as a team.
By applying tenets of Named agile software development methodologies, teams and managers can feel like they're discussing past and current experiences/successes/failures with comparable implementations of approaches that were or are appropriate for different contexts.
To argue the other side, just cherry picking from different methodologies is creating a new methodology, which requires time to justify basically what we already have terms for on the wall over here.
"We just pop tasks off the queue however" is really convenient for devs but can be kept cohesive by defining sensible queues: [kanban] board columns can indicate task/issue/card states and primacy, [sprint] milestone planning meetings can yield complexity 'points' estimates for completable tasks and their subtasks. With team velocity (points/time), a manager can try to appropriately schedule optimal paths of tasks (that meet the SMART criteria (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and Time-bound)); instead of fretting with the team over adjusting dates on a Gantt chart (task dependency graph) deadline, the team can
What about your testing approach makes it 'NOT TDD'?
How long should the pre-release static analysis and dynamic analyses take in my fancy DevOps CI TDD with optional CD? Can we release or deploy right now? Why or why not?
'We can't release today because we spent too much time arguing about quotes like "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." ("Self Reliance" 1841. Emerson) and we didn't spec out the roof trusses ahead of time because we're continually developing a new meeting format, so we didn't get to that, or testing the new thing, yet.'
A good programmer can answer the three questions in a regular meeting at any time, really:
> 1. What have you completed since the last meeting?
> 2. What do you plan to complete by the next meeting?
> 3. What is getting in your way?
And:
Can we justify refactoring right now for greater efficiency or additional functionality?
The simple solution there is to simply not use specific parameters (outside ovious edge-cases, ie supplying -1 and 2^63 into your memory allocator). Writing a simple reproducible fuzzer is easy for most contained functions.
I find blackbox testing itself also fairly useful. The part where you forget which parameter combinations may occur can be useful since you now A) rely on documentation you made and B) can write your test independent of how you implemented it just like if you had written it beforehand. (Just don't forget to avoid falling into the 'write test to pass function' trap)
IMHO, it's so much easier to write good, comprehensive tests while writing the function (FUT: function under test) because that information is already in working memory.
It's also easier to adversarially write tests with a fresh perspective.
I shouldn't need to fuzz every parameter for every commit. Certainly for releases.
"Building an AppSec Pipeline: Keeping your program, and your life, sane" https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_AppSec_Pipeline
I mean, I general don't think you should write fuzzers for absolutely everything (most contained functions => doesn't touch a lot of other stuff and few parameters with a known parameter space)
The general solution is to use whatever testing methodology you are comfortable, that is very effective, very efficient and covers a lot of problem space. Of course no testing method does that so you'll have to constantly balance whatever works best (which is why I think pure TDD is overrated)
> Is all unit/functional/integration testing and continuous integrating TDD?
No. They differentiate in the matrix.
> If you're not familiar with TDD, you haven't yet achieved that level of mastery.
That's not true - I've worked on teams with far lower defect rates than the typical TDD team.
TDD can help keep a developer focused - and this can help overall productivity rates - but it doesn't directly help lower defect rates.
> TDD can help keep a developer focused - and this can help overall productivity rates - but it doesn't directly help lower defect rates.
We would need to reference some data with statistical power; though randomization and control are infeasible: no two teams are the same, no two projects are the same, no two objective evaluations of different apps' teams' defect rates are an apples to apples comparison.
Maybe it's the coverage expectation: do not add code that is not run by at least one test.
Handles are the better pointers
A few years ago I wanted to make a shoot-em-up game using C# and XNA I could play with my kids on an Xbox. It worked fine except for slight pauses for GC every once in a while which ruined the experience.
The best solution I found was to get rid of objects and allocation entirely and instead store the state of the game in per-type tables like in this article.
Then I realized that I didn't need per-type tables at all, and if I used what amounted to a union of all types I could store all the game state in a single table, excluding graphical data and textures.
Next I realized that since most objects had properties like position and velocity, I could update those with a single method by iterating through the table.
That led to each "object" being a collection of various properties acted on by independent methods which were things like gravity and collision detection. I could specify that a particular game entity was subject to gravity or not, etc.
The resulting performance was fantastic and I found I could have many thousands of on-screen objects at the time with no hiccups. The design also made it really easy to save and replay game state; just save or serialize the single state table and input for each frame.
The final optimization would have been to write a language that would define game entities in terms of the game components they were subject to and automatically generate the single class that was union of all possible types and would be a "row" in the table. I didn't get around to that because it just wasn't necessary for the simple game I made.
I was inspired to do this from various articles about "component based game design" published at the time that were variations on this technique, and the common thread was that a hierarchical OO structure ended up adding a lot of unneeded complexity for games that hindered flexibility as requirements changed or different behaviors for in-game entities were added.
Edit: This is a good article on the approach. http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy...
> The final optimization would have been to write a language that would define game entities in terms of the game components they were subject to and automatically generate the single class that was union of all possible types and would be a "row" in the table
django-typed-models https://github.com/craigds/django-typed-models
> polymorphic django models using automatic type-field downcasting
> The actual type of each object is stored in the database, and when the object is retrieved it is automatically cast to the correct model class
...
> the common thread was that a hierarchical OO structure ended up adding a lot of unneeded complexity for games that hindered flexibility as requirements changed or different behaviors for in-game entities were added.
So, in order to draw a bounding box for an ensemble of hierarchically/tree/graph-linked objects (possibly modified in supersteps for reproducibility), is an array-based adjacency matrix still fastest?
Are sparse arrays any faster for this data architecture?
> django-typed-models https://github.com/craigds/django-typed-models
Interesting, never came across it. But I've got a Django GitHub library (not yet open source, because it's in a project I've been working with on and off) that does the same for managing GitHub's accounts. An Organization and User inherit the same properties and I downcast them based on their polymorphic type field.
ContentType.model_class(), models.Model.meta.abstract=True, django-reversion, django-guardian
IDK how to do partial indexes with the Django ORM? A simple filter(bool, rows) could probably significantly shrink the indexes for such a wide table.
Arrays are fast if the features/dimensions are known at compile time (if the TBox/schema is static). There's probably an intersection between object reference overhead and array copy costs.
Arrow (with e.g. parquet on disk) can help minimize data serialization/deserialization costs and maximize copy-free data interoperability (with columnar arrays that may have different performance characteristics for whole-scene transformation operations than regular arrays).
Many implementations of SQL ALTER TABLE don't have to create a full copy in order to add a column, but do require a permission that probably shouldn't be GRANTed to the application user and so online schema changes are scheduled downtime operations.
If you're not discovering new features at runtime and your access pattern is generally linear, arrays probably are the fastest data structure.
Hacker News also has a type attribute that you might say is used polymorphically: https://github.com/HackerNews/API/blob/master/README.md#item...
Types in RDF are additive: a thing may have zero or more rdf:type property instances. RDF quads can be stored in one SQL table like:
_id,g,s,p,o,xsd:datatype,xml:lang
... with a few compound indexes that are combinations of (s,p,o) so that triple pattern graph queries like (?s,?p,1) are fast. Partial indexes (SQLite, PostgreSQL,) would be faster than full-table indexes for RDF in SQL, too.
Neural scene representation and rendering
This work is a natural progression from a lot of other prior work in the literature... but that doesn't make the results any less impressive. The examples shown are amazingly, unbelievably good! Really GREAT WORK.
Based on a quick skim of the paper, here is my oversimplified description of how this works:
During training, an agent navigates an artificial 3D scene, observing multiple 2D snapshots of the scene, each snapshot from a different vantage point. The agent passes these snapshots to a deep net composed of two main parts: a representation-learning net and a scene-generation net. The representation-learning net takes as input the agent's observations and produces a scene representation (i.e., a lower-dimensional embedding which encodes information about the underlying scene). The scene-generation network then predicts the scene from three inputs: (1) an arbitrary query viewpoint, (2) the scene representation, and (3) stochastic latent variables. The two networks are trained jointly, end-to-end, to maximize the likelihood of generating the ground-truth image that would be observed from the query viewpoint. See Figure 1 on Page 15 of the Open Access version of the paper. Obviously I'm playing loose with language and leaving out numerous important details, but this is essentially how training works, as I understand it based on a first skim.
EDIT: I replaced "somewhat obvious" with "natural," which better conveys what I actually meant to write the first time around.
I, literally just 15 minutes ago, had a chat with a friend of mine exactly about how what we are doing right now with computer vision is all based on a flawed premise (supervised 2D training set). The human brain works in 3D space (or 3D+time) and then projects all this knowledge in a 2D image.
Here I was, thinking I finally had thought of a nice PhD project and then Deepmind comes along and gets the scoop! Haha.
"Spatial memory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_memory
It may be splitting hairs, but I think the mammalian brain, at least, can simulate/remember/imagine additional 'dimensions' like X/Y/Z spin, derivatives of velocity like acceleration/jerk/jounce.
Is space 11 dimensional (M string theory) or 2 dimensional (holographic principle)? What 'dimensions' does the human brain process? Is this capacity innate or learned; should we expect pilots and astronauts to have learned to more intuitively cognitively simulate gravity with their minds?
New US Solar Record – 2.155 Cents per KWh
"Cost of electricity by source" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
"Electricity pricing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
> United States 8 to 17 ; 37[c] 43[c] [cents USD/kWh]
Ask HN: Is there a taxonomy of machine learning types?
Besides classification and regression, and the unsupervised methods for principle components, clustering and frequent item-sets, what tools are there in the ML toolkit and what kinds of problems are amenable to their use?
Outline of Machine Learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_machine_learning
Machine learning # Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning#Applications
"machine learning map" image search: https://www.google.com/search?q=machine+learning+map&tbm=isc...
Senator requests better https compliance at US Department of Defense [pdf]
The "Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator" has a checkbox for 'HSTS enabled?' and can generate SSL/TLS configs for Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, HAProxy, AWS, ELB. https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generat...
You can select 'nginx', then 'modern', and then 'apache' for a modern Apache configuration.
Are the 'modern' configs FIPS compliant?
What browsers/tools does requiring TLS 1.3 break?
Banks Adopt Military-Style Tactics to Fight Cybercrime
> In a windowless bunker here, a wall of monitors tracked incoming attacks — 267,322 in the last 24 hours, according to one hovering dial, or about three every second — as a dozen analysts stared at screens filled with snippets of computer code.
> Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries. At least $445 billion was lost last year, up around 30 percent from just three years earlier, a global economic study found, and the Treasury Department recently designated cyberattacks as one of the greatest risks to the American financial sector.
Is this type of monitoring possible (necessary, even) with blockchains? Blockchains generally silently disregard bad/invalid transactions. Where could discarded/disregarded transactions and forks be reported to in a decentralized blockchain system? Who would pay for log storage? How redundantly replicated should which data be?
How DDOS resistant are centralized and decentralized blockchains?
Exchanges have risk. In terms of credit fraud: some crypto asset exchanges do allow margin trading, many credit card companies either refuse transactions with known exchanges or charge cash advance interest rates, and all transactions are final.
Exchanges hold private keys for customers' accounts, move a lot to offline cold storage, and maybe don't do a great job of explaining that YOU SHOULD NOT LEAVE MONEY ON AN EXCHANGE. One should transfer funds to a different account; such as a hardware or paper wallet or a custody service.
Do/can crypto asset exchanges participate in these exercises? To what extent do/can blockchains help solve for aspects of our unfortunately growing cybercrime losses?
Premined blockchains could reportedly handle card/chip/PIN transaction volumes today.
No, Section 230 Does Not Require Platforms to Be “Neutral”
> It’s foolish to suggest that web platforms should lose their Section 230 protections for failing to align their moderation policies to an imaginary standard of political neutrality. Trying to legislate such a “neutrality” requirement for online platforms—besides being unworkable—would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Ask HN: Do battery costs justify “buy all sell all” over “net metering”?
Are batteries the primary justification for "buy all sell all" over "net metering"?
Are next-gen supercapacitors the solution?
> Ask HN: Do battery costs justify "buy all sell all" over "net metering"?
> Are batteries the primary justification for "buy all sell all" over "net metering"?
> Are next-gen supercapacitors the solution?
With "Net Metering", electric utilities buy consumers' excess generated energy at retail or wholesale rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering
With "Buy All, Sell All", electric utilities require consumers to sell all of the energy they generate from e.g. solar panels (usually at wholesale prices, AFAIU) and buy all of the energy they consume at retail rates. They can't place the meter after any local batteries.
Do I have this right?
Net metering:
(used-generated) x (retail || wholesale)
Buy all, sell all:
(used x retail) - (generated x wholesale)
For the energy generating consumer, net metering is a better deal: they have power when the grid is down, and they keep or earn more for the energy generation capability they choose to invest in.
Break-even on solar panels happens sooner with net metering.
Utilities argue that: maintaining grid storage and transfer costs money, which justifies paying energy generating consumers less than they pay for more constant sources of energy like dams, wind farms, and commercial solar plants.
Building a two-way power transfer grid costs money. Batteries require replacement after a limited number of cycles. Spiky or bursting power generation is not good for batteries because they don't get a full cycle. [Hemp] supercapacitors can smooth out that load and handle many more partial charge and discharge cycles.
Is energy storage the primary justifying cost driver for "buy all, sell all"?
What investments are needed in order to more strongly incentivize clean energy generation? Do we need low cost supercapacitors to handle the spiky load?
Are these utilities granted a monopoly? Are they price fixing?
Energy demand from blockchain mining has not managed to keep demand constant so that utilities have profit to invest in clean energy generation and a two-way smart grid that accommodates spiky consumer energy generation. Demand for electricity is falling as we become less wasteful and more energy efficient. As the cost of renewable energy continues to fall (and become less expensive than nonrenewables), there should be more margin for energy utilities which cost-rationally and environmentally-rationally choose to buy renewable energy and sell it to consumers.
Please correct me with the appropriate terminology.
How can we more strongly incentivize consumer solar panel investments?
Here's a discussion about the lower costs of hemp supercapacitors as compared with graphene super capacitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800693
""" Hemp supercapacitors might be a good solution to the energy grid storage problem. Hemp absorbs carbon, doesn't leave unplowable roots in the fields, returns up to 70% of nutrients to the soil, and grows quickly just about anywhere. Hemp bast fiber is normally waste. Hemp anodes for supercapacitors are made from the bast fiber that is normally waste.
Graphene is very useful; but industrial production of graphene is dangerous because lungs and blood-brain barrier.
Hemp is an alternative to graphene for modern supercapacitors (which now have much greater [energy density] in wH/kg)
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
I feel like a broken record mentioning this again and again. ""'
Portugal electricity generation temporarily reaches 100% renewable
Currently we are passing through an atypical wind and rain period. Our dams are full and pouring out water as we are producing more energy than we consume.
Despite all of this energy prices don't drop as they are bound to one of the few legal monopolies in Europe: the grid operation cartel (REN in the article, there is only one allowed for each EU country).
Also this feels as fake news since we have a few very old (and historically insecure, like sines power plant and carregado power plant) fossil fuel power plants that are still operating with no signs of slowing down while making profits through several scams in chemical engineering their way into the 0 emissions lot.
are batteries (or some sort of storage) in the infrastructure plan for the future?
Hemp supercapacitors might be a good solution to the energy grid storage problem. Hemp absorbs carbon, doesn't leave unplowable roots in the fields, returns up to 70% of nutrients to the soil, and grows quickly just about anywhere.
Hemp bast fiber is normally waste. Hemp anodes for supercapacitors are made from the bast fiber that is normally waste.
Graphene is very useful; but industrial production of graphene is dangerous because lungs and blood-brain barrier.
Hemp is an alternative to graphene for modern supercapacitors (which now have much greater power density in wH/kg)
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
I feel like a broken record mentioning this again and again.
If you're going to be mentioning this again in the future please correct your usage of power/energy density. Power density is measured in W/kg, energy density is measured in Wh/kg. Supercapacitors tend to excel in the former but be poor in the latter. You mentioned power density but used units for energy density. This happens so often in media that I feel the need to correct it even in a comment.
> please correct your usage of power/energy density. Power density is measured in W/kg, energy density is measured in Wh/kg. Supercapacitors tend to excel in the former but be poor in the latter.
I'd update the units; good call. You may have that confused? Traditional supercapacitors have had lower power density and faster charging/discharging. Graphene and hemp somewhat change the game, AFAIU.
It makes sense to put supercapacitors in front of the battery banks because they last so many cycles and because they charge and discharge so quickly (a very helpful capability for handling spiky wind and solar loads).
I think you may still be a little confused. Power density is the rate at which energy can be added to or drawn from the the cell per unit mass. So faster charging and discharging means high power density. Energy density is the total amount of energy that can be stored per unit mass. Supercapacitors are typically higher in power density and lower in energy density than batteries[1].
You're right that it makes sense to put supercapacitors in front of the battery banks for the reasons you said.
[1] http://berc.berkeley.edu/storage-wars-batteries-vs-supercapa...
I must have logically assumed that rate of charge and discharge include time (hours) in the unit: Wh/kg.
My understanding is that there's usually a curve over time t that represents the charging rate from empty through full.
[edit]
"C rate"
Battery_(electricity)#C_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity)#C_rate
Battery_charger#C-rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_charger#C-rates
> Charge and discharge rates are often denoted as C or C-rate, which is a measure of the rate at which a battery is charged or discharged relative to its capacity. As such the C-rate is defined as the charge or discharge current divided by the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge. While rarely stated explicitly, the unit of the C-rate is [h^−1], equivalent to stating the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge in unit hour times current in the same unit as the charge or discharge current.
It does sound amazing and economical, like almost too good to be true, but I very much hope it is true. What are the downsides? Is there a degradation problem or something similar? Other than the stoner connection in people's minds, what kind of resistance is there to this? Why isn't it widely known?
You know, I'm not sure. This article is from a few years ago now and there's not much uptake.
It may be that most people dismiss supercapacitors based on the stats for legacy (pre-graphene/pre-hemp) supercapacitors: large but quick and long-lasting.
It may be that hemp is taxed at up to 90% because it's a controlled substance in the US (but not in Europe, Canada, or China; where we must import shelled hemp seeds from). A historical accident?
GPU Prices Drop ~25% in March as Supply Normalizes
How do these new GPUs compare to those from 10 years ago in terms of FLOPs per Watt? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
The new ASICs for Ethereum mining can't be solely responsible for this percent of the market.
(Note that NVIDIA's stock price is up over 1700% over the past 10 years. And that Bitcoin mining on CPUs and GPUs hasn't been profitable for quite awhile. In 2007, I don't think we knew that hashing could be done on GPUs; though there were SSL accelerator cards that were mighty expensive)
Apple says it’s now powered by renewable energy worldwide
As this article [1] explains, Apple does not (and cannot) actually run on 100% renewable energy globally, as any of its stores/premises/facilities that are connected to local municipal power grids will use whatever power generation method is used on that grid, and that is still likely to be fossil fuel in most locations.
But they purchase Renewable Energy Certificates to offset their use of non-renewable energy, so they can make the claim that their net consumption of non-renewable electricity is negative.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/9/17216656/apple-renewable-e...
This is weird. So if I run a wind farm that generates 1 MW(...h? why is this an energy unit and not power? but whatever...) and I use all of that electricity myself, I can also sell 1 REC to someone else so that they claim they run on green electricity. Which means that now either (a) I have to legally claim I run on dirty electricity (which is a lie on its face and make no sense???) or (b) we both claim we run on green power, double-dipping and screwing up the accounting of greenness.
Am I misunderstanding something? How does this work?
No that's how it works. That's also the reason why Norway, despite only using hydro, has only 40-50% renewable energy in some statistics. They sell green energy certificates to consumers abroad (e.g. in Germany). Officially, Norwegians then use coal power whereas in reality it's all hydro power. There isn't even enough transmission capacity to the south to get that kind of exchange physically.
Wow! And I just realized there seems to be another loophole: that means (say) a company like Apple could start a separate power company in Norway based on hydro power, have that company completely waste 100% of the energy it produce there, and yet "buy" the equivalent REC in another jurisdiction where they run on coal and suddenly get to 100% "green" power... potentially even making more money in tax credits, if there are any, all while consuming more and more dirty power without actually helping anybody shift to renewable energy. Right?
I think it comes down to giving them credit for funding the construction of massive clean energy projects, even if they don't exclusively use the electricity from that project themselves.
Look at Microsoft. They just funded a deal to build out an absolutely massive solar farm in Virginia.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/03/21/new-sol...
They do have facilities in state that will only need a fraction of that power to be 100% green, and the excess will be pumped into the local Virginia power grid and used by consumers there.
Basically, Microsoft is saying that they funded the project to generate excess green energy in one place to offset the dirty energy they consume in areas where there is no local green power option available.
100% renewable energy by purchasing and funding renewable energy is an outstanding acheivement.
Is there another statistic for measuring how many KWhr or MWhr are sourced directly from renewable energy sources (or, more logically, 'directly' from batteries + hemp supercapacitors between use and generation)?
Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
There's an open call for papers/proposals for handling the deluge. "Funding will be provided as an unrestricted gift to the proposer's organization(s)" ... "Twitter Health Metrics Proposal Submission" https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org
Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?
It seems to me like you don't understand the crucial difference between Twitter and Mastodon.
There's no such thing as Mastodon, a singular social network. Mastodon is a series of instances that talk to each other. A sysadmin running the instance can do whatever he pleases in his instance, including closing the registration, banning entire instances from communicating with his instance, and enforcing whichever rules he wants to enforce.
Mastodon doesn't deal with such issues at all. It's sysadmins running Mastodon instances that are supposed to deal with such issues.
It's more like reddit, where mods of subreddits have nearly complete authority over their own space on the social network, than it is like Twitter, in which a single entity is in charge.
Mastodon is a federated system like StatusNet/GNU Social.
So, in your opinion, Mastodon nodes - by virtue of being federated - would be better equipped to handle the spam and harassment volume that Twitter is subject to?
I find that hard to believe.
ActivityPub (and OStatus, and ActivityStreams/Salmon, and OpenSocial) are all great specs and great ideas. Hosting and moderation cost real money (which spammers/scammers are wasting).
Know what's also great? Learning. For learning, we have the xAPI/TinCan spec and also schema.org/Action.
“We’re committing Twitter to increase the health and civility of conversation”
First Amendment protections apply to suits brought by the government. Civil suits are required to prove damages ("quantum of loss").
There are many open platforms. (I've contributed to those as well). Some are built on open standards. None of said open platforms have procedures or resources for handling the onslaught of disrespectful trash that the people we've raised eventually use these platforms for communicating at other people who have feelings and understand the Golden Rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
The initial early adopters (who have other better things to do) are fine: helpful, caring, critical, respectful; healthy. And then everyone else comes surging in with hate, disrespect, and vitriol; unhealthy. They don't even realize that being hateful and disrespectful is making them more depressed. They think that complaining and talking smack to people is changing the world. And then they turn off the phone or log out of the computer, and carry on with their lives.
No-one taught them to be the positive, helpful energy they want to attract from the world. No-one properly conditioned them to either respectfully disagree according to the data or sit down and listen. No-one explained to them that a well-founded argument doesn't fit in 140 or 280 characters, but a link and a headline do. No-one explained to them that what they write on the internet lasts forever and will be found by their future interviewers, investors, jurors, and voters. No-one taught them that being respectful and helpful in service of other people - of the group's success, of peaceful coexistence - is the way to get ahead AND be happy. "No-one told me that."
Shareholders of public corporations want to see growth in meaningless numbers, foreign authoritarian governments see free expression as a threat to their ever-so-fragile self-perceptions, political groups seek to frame and smear and malign and discredit (because they are so in need of group acceptance; because money still isn't making them happy), and there are children with too much free time reading all of these.
No-one is holding these people accountable: we need transparency and accountability. We need to focus on more important goals and feel good about helping; about volunteering our time to help others be happier.
Instead, now that these haters and scam artists have all self-identified, we must spend our time conditioning their communications until they learn to respectfully disagree on facts and data or go somewhere else. "That's how you feel? Great. How does that make your victim feel?" is the confrontation that some people are seeking from companies that set out to serve free speech and provide a forum for citizens to share the actual news.
Who's going to pay for that? Can they sue for their costs and losses? Advertisers do not want a spot next to hateful and disrespectful.
"How dare you speak of censorship in such veiled terms!?" Really? They're talking about taking down phrases like "kill" and "should die"; not phrases like "I disagree because:"
So, now, because there are so many hateful economically disadvantaged people in the world with nothing better to do and no idea how to run a business or keep a job with benefits, these companies need to staff 24 hour a day censors to take down the hate and terror and gang recruiting within one hour. What a distorted mirror of our divisively fractured wealth inequality, indeed.
"Ban gangs ASAP, please: they'll just go away"
How much does it cost to pay prison labor to redundantly respond to this trash? Are those the skills they need to choose a different career with benefits and savings that meet or exceed inflation when they get out?
What is the procedure for referring threats of violence to justice in your jurisdiction? Are there wealthy individuals in your community who would love to contribute resources to this effort? Maybe they have some region-specific pointers for helping the have-nots out here trolling like it's going to get them somewhere they want to be in life?
Let me share a little story with you:
A person walks into a bar/restaurant, flicks off the bartender/waiter, orders 5 glasses of free water, starts plastering ads to the walls and other peoples' tables, starts making threats to groups of people cordially conversing, and walks out.
Gitflow – Animated in React
Thanks! A command log would be really helpful too.
The HubFlow docs contain GitFlow docs and some really helpful diagrams: https://datasift.github.io/gitflow/IntroducingGitFlow.html
I change the release prefix to 'v' so that the git tags for the release look like 'v0.0.1' and 'v0.1.0':
git config --replace-all gitflow.prefix.versiontag v
git config --replace-all hubflow.prefix.versiontag v
Sure.. will add the command log
Ask HN: How feasible is it to become proficient in several disciplines?
For example to become a professional in:
- back-end api development
- DevOps
- Data Engineer (big data, data science, ML, etc)
It is feasible, though as with any type of specialization, you're then a "jack of all trades, master of none". Maybe a title like "Full Stack Data Engineer" would be descriptive.
You could write an OAuth API for accepting and performing analysis of datasets (model fitting / parameter estimation; classification or prediction), write a test suite, write Kubernetes YAML for a load-balanced geodistributed dev/test/prod architecture, and continuously deploy said application (from branch merges, optionally with a manual confirmation step; e.g. with GitLab CI) and still not be an actual Data Engineer.
After rising for 100 years, electricity demand is flat
Cryptocurrency mining is about to consume more electricity than home usage in Iceland.[1] I assume it's similar in other places that have cheaper electricity.
Seems that power companies should encourage consumers to mine Bitcoin. Problem solved.
[1] https://qz.com/1204840/iceland-will-use-more-electricity-min...
> Seems that power companies should encourage consumers to mine Bitcoin. Problem solved.
Blockchains will likely continue to generate considerable demand for electricity for the foreseeable future.
Blockchain firms can locate where energy is cheapest. Currently that's in countries where energy prices go negative due to excess capacity and insufficient energy storage resources (batteries, [hemp/graphene] supercapacitors, water towers).
With continued demand, energy companies can continue to invest in new clean energy generation alternatives.
Unfortunately, in the current administration's proposed budget, funding for ARPA-E is cancelled and allocated to clean coal; which Canada, France, and the UK are committed to phasing out entirely by ~2030.
A framework for evaluating data scientist competency
Something HTML with local state like "Programmer Competency Matrix" would be great.
http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
Levi Strauss to use lasers instead of people to finish jeans
Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice
awesome-chaos-engineering lists a bunch of chaos engineering resources and tools such as Gremlin: https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-chaos-engineering
Scientists use an atomic clock to measure the height of a mountain
Quantum_clock#More_accurate_experimental_clocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_clock#More_accurate_ex...
> In 2015 JILA evaluated the absolute frequency uncertainty of their latest strontium-87 optical lattice clock at 2.1 × 10−18, which corresponds to a measurable gravitational time dilation for an elevation change of 2 cm (0.79 in) on planet Earth that according to JILA/NIST Fellow Jun Ye is "getting really close to being useful for relativistic geodesy".
AFAIU, this type of geodesy isn't possible with 'normal' time structs. Are nanoseconds enough?
"[Python-Dev] PEP 564: Add new time functions with nanosecond resolution" https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-October/14...
The thread you linked makes a good point: there isn't really any reason to care about the actual time, only the relative time. These sorts of clocks just use 256- or 512-bit counters; it's not like they're having overflow issues.
Resources to learn project management best practices?
My side project is beginning to attract interest from a few people who would like to hop on board. At this point I am just doing what feels familiar and sensible, but the project manager perspective is new to me. Are there any sort of articles/books/podcasts/etc that could clue me into how to become better at it?
Project Management: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development... ... #requirements-traceability, #work-breakdown-structure (Mission, Project, Goal/Objective #n; Issue #n, - [ ] Task)
"Ask HN: How do you, as a developer, set measurable and actionable goals?" https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-15119635
- Burndown Chart, User Stories
... GitHub and GitLab have milestones and reorderable issue boards. I still like https://waffle.io for complexity points; though you can also just create labels for e.g. complexity (Complexity-5) and priority (Priority-5).
Ask HN: Thoughts on a website-embeddable, credential validating service?
Reading Troy Hunt's password release V2 blog post [0], I came across the NIST recommendation to prevent users from creating accounts with passwords discovered in data breaches. This got me thinking: would a website admin (ex. small business owner with a custom website) benefit from a service that validates user passwords? The idea is to create a registration iframe with forms for email, password, etc., which would check hashed credentials against a database of data from breaches. Additionally, client-side validation would enforce rules recommended by the NIST's Digital Identity Guidelines [1], which would relieve admins from implementing their own rules. I'm sure there are additional security features that can be added.
1. Have you seen a need for this type of service, and could you see this being adopted at all?
2. Do you know of a service like this? I've looked, no hits so far.
3. Does the architecture seem sound?
[0]: https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/
[1]: https://www.nist.gov/itl/tig/projects/special-publication-800-63
blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js: https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js
> A library to enable parsing and verifying a Blockcert. This can be used as a node package or in a browser. The browserified script is available as verifier.js.
https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer
> The cert-issuer project issues blockchain certificates by creating a transaction from the issuing institution to the recipient on the Bitcoin blockchain that includes the hash of the certificate itself.
... We could/should also store X.509 cert hashes in a blockchain.
Exactly what part of such a service would benefit from anything related to a blockchain?
Are you asking me why blockcerts stores certs in a blockchain?
Or whether using certs (really long passwords) is a better option than submitting unhashed passwords on a given datetime to a third-party in order to make sure they're not in the pwned passwords tables?
I was just reading about a company trying to make self-sovereign identity including actual certs (like degrees and such) an accessible and widely applicable/acceptable technology using Ethereum blockchain. I thought it showed some real practicality and promise. I believe it begins with U- forgot the name.Perhaps UPort? Anyhow, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone here about why that might be a bad or good idea. I don't personally have the skill in that tech to know.
Known Traveler Digital Identity system is a "new model for airport screening and security that uses biometrics, cryptography and distributed ledger technologies."
Blockcerts are for academic credentials, AFAIU.
[EDIT]
Existing blockchains have a limited TPS (transactions per second) for writes; but not for reads. Sharding and layer-2 (sidechains) do not have the same assurances. I'm sure we all remember how cryptokitties congested the txpool during the Bitcoin futures launch.
Thank you. I looked into "clear", one of the airport known traveler ID systems. (I'm assuming there are others) It's pretty cool/concerning. Takes ~ 8 min to load a traveler into its system. Thanks for reminding me of TPS---the info on read vs write.
Ask HN: What's the best algorithms and data structures online course?
These aren't courses, but from answers to "Ask HN: Recommended course/website/book to learn data structure and algorithms" :
Data Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure
Algorithm:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
Big O notation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation
Big-O Cheatsheet: http://bigocheatsheet.com
Coding Interview University > Data Structures: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university/blob/...
OSSU: Open Source Society University > Core CS > Core Theory > "Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I" [&2] https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/blob/master/README....
"Algorithms, 4th Edition" (2011; Sedgewick, Wayne): https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/
Complexity Zoo > Petting Zoo (P, NP,): https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Petting_Zoo
While perusing awesome-awesomeness [1], I found awesome-algorithms [2] , algovis [3], and awesome-big-o [4].
[1] https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
[2] https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms
Using Go as a scripting language in Linux
I, too, didn't realize that shebang parsing is implemented in the `binfmt_script` kernel module.
Does this persist across reboots?
echo ':golang:E::go::/usr/local/bin/gorun:OC' | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/registerNo, but different init systems may autoload formats based on some configuration files. Systemd, for instance: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-bin...
Guidelines for enquiries regarding the regulatory framework for ICOs [pdf]
This is a helpful table indicating whether a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid coin/token: is a security, qualifies under Swiss AML payment law.
The "Minimum information requirements for ICO enquiries" appendix seems like a good set of questions for evaluating ICOs. Are there other good questions to ask when considering whether to invest in a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid ICO?
Are US regulations different from these clear and helpful regulatory guidelines for ICOs in Switzerland?
> Are there other good questions to ask when considering whether to invest in a Payment, Utility, Asset, or Hybrid ICO?
This paper doesn seem to cover that, only on how regulators should treat investments.
On investing in ICOs, the questions are the same as any other IPO. And, in most cases, just speculation.
The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
> Read your programming book as normal. When you get to a code sample, read it over
> Then close the book.
> Then try to type it up.
According to a passage in "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" (1791) regarding re-typing from "The Spectator"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_...
Avoiding blackouts with 100% renewable energy
I notice that cases A and C require batteries for storage.
Should there be a separate entry for new gen supercapacitors? Supercapacitors built with both graphene and hemp have different Max Charge Rate (GW), Max Discharge Rate (GW), and Storage (TWh) capacities than even future-extrapolated batteries and current supercapacitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
The cost and capabilities stats in this article look very promising:
"Hemp Carbon Makes Supercapacitors Superfast” https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/energy/hemp...
> “Our device’s electrochemical performance is on par with or better than graphene-based devices,” Mitlin says. “The key advantage is that our electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.”
> Graphene is, however, expensive to manufacture, costing as much as $2,000 per gram. [...] developed a process for converting fibrous hemp waste into a unique graphene-like nanomaterial that outperforms graphene. What’s more, it can be manufactured for less than $500 per ton.
> Hemp fiber waste was pressure-cooked (hydrothermal synthesis) at 180 °C for 24 hours. The resulting carbonized material was treated with potassium hydroxide and then heated to temperatures as high as 800 °C, resulting in the formation of uniquely structured nanosheets. Testing of this material revealed that it discharged 49 kW of power per kg of material—nearly triple what standard commercial electrodes supply, 17 kW/kg.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=hemp+supercapacit...
To be clear, supercapacitors are an alternative to li-ion batteries.
"Matching demand with supply at low cost in 139 countries among 20 world regions with 100% intermittent wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) for all purposes" (Renewable Energy, 2018) https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb...
Ask HN: What are some common abbreviations you use as a developer?
These are called 'codelabels'. They're great for prefix-tagging commit messages, pull requests, and todo lists:
BLD: build
BUG: bug
CLN: cleanup
DOC: documentation
ENH: enhancement
ETC: config
PRF: performance
REF: refactor
RLS: release
SEC: security
TST: test
UBY: usability
DAT: data
SCH: schema
REQ: requirement
REQ: request
ANN: announcement
STORY: user story
EPIC: grouping of user stories
There's a table of these codelabels here: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...
Someday TODO FIXME XXX I'll get around to:
- [ ] DOC: create a separate site/organization for codelabels
- [ ] ENH: a tool for creating/renaming GitHub labels with unique foreground and background colors
YAGNI: Ya' ain't gonna need it
LOL, lulz
DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself
KISS: Keep It Super Simple
MVC: Model-View-Controller
MVT: Model-View-Template
MVVM: Model-View-View-Model
UI: User Interface
UX: User Experience
GUI: Graphical User Interface
CLI: Command Line Interface
CAP: Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance
DHT: Distributed Hash Table
ETL: Extract, Transform, and Load
ESB: Enterprise Service Bus
MQ: Message Queue
VM: Virtual Machine
LXC: Linux Containers
[D]VCS, RCS: [Distributed] Version/Revision Control System
XP: Extreme Programming
CI: Continuous Integration
CD: Continuous Deployment
TDD: Test-Driven Development
BDD: Behavior-Driven Development
DFS, BFS: Depth/Breadth First Search
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
CMS: Content Management System
LMS: Learning Management System
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning system
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
HTTP STS: HTTP Strict Transport Security
REST: Representational State Transfer
API: Application Programming Interface
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
DOM: Document Object Model
LD: Linked Data
LOD: Linked Open Data
URI: Uniform Resource Indicator
URN: Uniform Resource Name
URL: Uniform Resource Locator
UUID: Universally Unique Identifier
RDF: Resource Description Format
RDFS: RDF Schema
OWL: Web Ontology Language
JSON-LD: JSON Linked Data
JSON: JavaScript Object Notation
CSVW: CSV on the Web
CSV: Comma Separated Values
CIA: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability
ACL: Access Control List
RBAC: Role-Based Access Control
MAC: Mandatory Access Control
CWE: Common Weakness Enumeration
CVE: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
XSS: Cross-Site Scripting
CSRF: Cross-Site Request Forgery
SQLi: SQL Injection
ORM: Object-Relational Model
AUC: Area Under Curve
ROC: Receiver Operating Characteristic
DL: Description Logic
RL: Reinforcement Learning
CNN: Convolutional Neural Network
DNN: Deep Neural Network
IS: Information Systems
ROI: Return on Investment
RPU: Revenue per User
MAU: Monthly Active Users
DAU: Daily Active Users
STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics/Medicine
STEAM: STEM + Arts
W3C: World-Wide-Web Consortium
GNU: GNU's not Unix
WRDRD: WRD R&D
... The Sphinx ``.. index::`` directive makes it easy to include index entries for acronym forms, too https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/genindex
There Might Be No Way to Live Comfortably Without Also Ruining the Planet
"A good life for all within planetary boundaries" (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4
> Abstract: Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.
> "Radical changes are needed if all people are to live well within the limits of the planet," [...]
> "These include moving beyond the pursuit of economic growth in wealthy nations, shifting rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and significantly reducing inequality.
> "Our physical infrastructure and the way we distribute resources are both part of what we call provisioning systems. If all people are to lead a good life within the planet's limits then these provisioning systems need to be fundamentally restructured to allow for basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use."
Perhaps ironically, our developments in service of sustainability (resource efficiency) needs for a civilization on Mars are directly relevant to solving these problems on Earth.
Recycle everything.
Survive without soil, steel, hydrocarbons, animals, oxygen.
Convert CO2, sunlight, H20, and geothermal energy to forms necessary for life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mars
Algae, carbon capture, carbon sequestration, lab grown plants, water purification, solar power, [...]
Mars requires a geomagnetic field in order to sustain an atmosphere in order to [...].
"The Limits to Growth" (1972, 2004) [1] very clearly forecasts these same unsustainable patterns of resource consumption: 'needs' which exceed and transgress our planetary biophysical boundaries.
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (#GlobalGoals) [2] outline our worthwhile international objectives (Goals, Targets, and Indicators). The Paris Agreement [3] sets targets and asks for commitments from nation states (and businesses) to help achieve these goals most efficiently and most sustainably.
In the US, the Clean Power Plan [4] was intended to redirect our national resources toward renewable energy with far less external costs. Direct and indirect subsidies for nonrenewables are irrational. Are subsidies helpful or necessary to reach production volumes of renewable energy products and services?
There are certainly financial incentives for anyone who chooses to invest in solving for the Global Goals; and everyone can!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[2] http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develop...
Multiple GWAS finds 187 intelligence genes and role for neurogenesis/myelination
> We found evidence that neurogenesis and myelination—as well as genes expressed in the synapse, and those involved in the regulation of the nervous system—may explain some of the biological differences in intelligence.
re: nurture, hippocampal plasticity and hippocampal neurogenesis also appear to be affected by dancing and omega-3,6 (which are transformed into endocannabinoids by the body): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109698
Could we solve blockchain scaling with terabyte-sized blocks?
These numbers in a computational model (or even Jupyter notebooks) would be useful.
We may indeed need fractional satoshis ('naks').
With terabyte blocks, lightning network would be unnecessary: at least for TPS.
There will need to be changes to account for quantum computing capabilities somewhere in the future timeline of Bitcoin (and everything else in banking and value-producing industry). Probably maybe a different hash function instead of just a routine difficulty increase (and definitely something other than ECDSA, which isn't a primary cost). $1.3m/400k a year to operate a terabyte mining rig with 50Gbps bandwidth would affect decentralization; though maybe not any more than it already is affected now.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_... (51%)
Confidence intervals for these numbers would be useful.
Casper PoS and beyond may also affect future Bitcoin volume estimates.
Ask HN: Do you have ADD/ADHD? How do you manage it?
Also, how has it affected your CS career? I feel that transitioning to management would help, as it does not require lengthy periods of concentration, but rather distributed attention for shorter periods.
Music. Headphones. Chillstep, progressive, chillout etc. from di.fm. Long mixes from SoundCloud with and without vocals. "Instrumental"
Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Less sugar and processed foods. Though everyone has a different resting glucose level.
Apparently it's called alpha-pinene.
Fidget things. Rubberband, paperclip.
The Pomodoro Technique: work 25 minutes, chill for 5 (and look at something at least 20 feet away (20-20-20 rule))
Lists. GTD. WBS.
Exercise. Short walks.
Ask HN: How to understand the large codebase of an open-source project?
Hello All!
what are techniques you all used to learn and understand a large codebase? what are the tools you use?
What is the best way to learn to code from absolute scratch?
We have been hosting a Ugandan refugee in our home in Oakland for the past 9 months and he wants to learn how to code.
Where is the best place for him to start from absolute scratch? What resources can we point him to? Who can help?
Here's an answer to a similar question: "Ask HN: How to introduce someone to programming concepts during 12-hour drive?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15454421
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python3/ (Python3)
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ (Javascript)
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/git/ (Git)
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/markdown/ (Markdown)
Read the docs. Read the source. Write docstrings. Write automated tests: that's the other half of the code.
Keep a journal of your knowledge as e.g. Markdown or ReStructuredText; regularly pull the good ones from bookmarks and history into an outline.
I keep a tools reference doc with links to Wikipedia, Homepage, Source, Docs: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/tools/
And a single-page log of my comments: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/
> To get a job, "Coding Interview University": https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Wow, thank you so much. This is incredibly useful.
Tesla racing series: Electric cars get the green light – Roadshow
Tesla Racing Circuit ideas for increasing power discharge rate, reducing heat, and reducing build weight:
Hemp supercapacitors (similar power density as graphene supercapacitors and li-ion, lower cost than graphene)
Active cooling. Modified passive cooling.
Biocomposite frame and panels (stronger and lighter than steel and aluminum (George Washington Carver))
> Biocomposite frame and panels (stronger and lighter than steel and aluminum (George Washington Carver))
"Soybean Car" (1941) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car
What happens if you have too many jupyter notebooks?
These days there is a tendency in data analysis to use Jupyter Notebooks. But what happens if you have too many jupyter notebooks? For example, there are more than a hundred.
Actually, you start creating some modules. However, it is less convenient to work with them compared to what was before. It happens that you should code in web interface, somewhere in similar to the notepad++ form or you should change your IDLE.
Personally, I work in Pycharm and so far I couldn't assess remote interpreter or VCS. It is because pickle files or word2vec weighs too much (3gb+) and so I don't want to download/upload them. Also Jupyter is't cool in pycharm.
Do you have better practices in your companies? How to correctly adjust IDLE? Do you know about any possible substitution for the IPython notebook in the world of data analysis?
> what happens if you have too many jupyter notebooks? For example, there are more than a hundred.
Like anything else, Jupyter Notebook is limited by the CPU and RAM of the system hosting the Tornado server and Jupyter kernels.
At 100 notebooks (or even just one), it may be a good time to factor common routines into a packaged module with tests and documentation.
It's actually possible (though inefficient) to import code from Jupyter notebooks with ipython/ipynb (pypi:ipynb): https://github.com/ipython/ipynb ( https://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples/N... )
> Actually, you start creating some modules. However, it is less convenient to work with them compared to what was before. It happens that you should code in web interface, somewhere in similar to the notepad++ form or you should change your IDLE.
The Spyder IDE has support for .ipynb notebooks converted to .py (which have the IPython prompt markers in them). Spyder can connect an interpreter prompt to a running IPython/Jupyter kennel. There's also a Spyder plugin for Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder-notebook
> Personally, I work in Pycharm and so far I couldn't assess remote interpreter or VCS. It is because pickle files or word2vec weighs too much (3gb+) and so I don't want to download/upload them.
Remote data access times can be made faster by increasing the space efficiency of the storage format, increasing the bandwidth of the connection, moving the data to the code, or moving the code to the data.
> Do you have better practices in your companies?
There are a number of [Reproducible] Data Science cookiecutter templates which have a directory for notebooks, module packaging, and Sphinx docs: https://cookiecutter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html#da...
Refactoring increases testability and code reuse.
> How to correctly adjust IDLE?
I don't think I understand the question?
"Configuring IPython" https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config/index.html
Jupyter > "Installation, Configuration, and Usage" https://jupyter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/projects/content-pr...
> Do you know about any possible substitution for the IPython notebook in the world of data analysis?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface :
> > "Examples of the notebook interface include the Mathematica notebook, Maple worksheet, MATLAB notebook, IPython/Jupyter, R Markdown, Apache Zeppelin, Apache Spark Notebook, and the Databricks cloud."
There are lots of Jupyter kernels for different tools and languages (over 100; including for other 'notebook interfaces'): https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels
And there are lots of Jupyter integrations and extensions: https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education/blob/m...
Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice
The article is about this study:
"Eradication of spontaneous malignancy by local immunotherapy" http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/426/eaan4488
> In situ vaccination with low doses of TLR ligands and anti-OX40 antibodies can cure widespread cancers in preclinical models.
Boosting teeth’s healing ability by mobilizing stem cells in dental pulp
Tideglusib
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tideglusib
> "Promotion of natural tooth repair by small molecule GSK3 antagonists" https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39654
> [...] Here we describe a novel, biological approach to dentine restoration that stimulates the natural formation of reparative dentine via the mobilisation of resident stem cells in the tooth pulp.
This Biodegradable Paper Donut Could Let Us Reforest the Planet
"These drones can plant 100,000 trees a day" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16260892
Drones that can plant 100k trees a day
> It’s simple maths. We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year.
This is a regional thing [0] though. We need to plant the trees in Latin America, Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The rest of the world is gaining forests.
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/23/deforestation-whe...
Now, the question is, which industry sector cuts the largest percentage of trees. Now, answering that question, is there a way to do the same thing without cutting trees?
Answering that question and then executing a business plan is probably worth billions.
Planting trees to combat 6 billion trees lost every year is a pure expense, no profit to be made at all. At least not if you won't cut them down a few decades later.
A very good way to absorb atmospheric carbon is to plant new trees and cut down and use old ones for anything else but burning it.
"This Biodegradable Paper Donut Could Let Us Reforest The Planet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261101
I think this kind of thing is funny for us westerners. I recently found this tech has been used in arid countries for possibly hundreds or thousands of years.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ollas+gardening&t=lm&iax=images&ia...
I do realize the ollas are for more permanent gardens, but it's the same concept. I do hope the paper version gets used, there are plenty of places that could benefit from it.
What are some YouTube channels to progress into advanced levels of programming?
There are some cool YouTube channel suggestions on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224165 But I wanted to know which of those are great to progress into advanced level of programming? Which of the channels teach advanced techniques?
These aren't channels, but a number of the links are marked with "(video)":
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university/blob/...
Thanks
Multiple issue and pull request templates
+1
Default: /ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md
/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/<name>.md</name>
Default: /PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/<name>.md</name>
You can leave the last S for off (for savings) if you want /ISSUE_TEMPLATE(S)/ or /PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE(S)/
Five myths about Bitcoin’s energy use
Regarding the proof-of-stake part: Ethereum devs are also working on sharding which will make scaling on the Ethereum Blockchain way easier. I really think that Ethereum will be the No.1 cryptocurrency in the near future. Bitcoin devs showed plenty of times, that they are not capable of keeping pace with demand (couldn't even get the block size thing right). Bitcoin is virtually dead. No one can really use it for real world transactions. Plus Bitcoin in reality is a really central coin, completely in the hands of the miners. Even if the Bitcoin devs decided to go with PoS, the miners wouldn't agree.
Proof of Work (Bitcoin*, ...), Proof of Stake (Ethereum Casper), Proof of Space, Proof of Research (GridCoin, CureCoin,)
Plasma (Ethereum) and Lightning Network (BitCoin (SHA256), Litecoin (scrypt),) will likely offload a significant amount of transaction volume and thereby reduce the kWh/transaction metrics.
> But electricity costs matter even more to a Bitcoin miner than typical heavy industry. Electricity costs can be 30-70% of their total costs of operation.
> [...] If Bitcoin mining really does begin to consume vast quantities of the global electricity supply it will, it follows, spur massive growth in efficient electricity production—i.e. the green energy revolution. Moore’s Law was partially a story about incredible advances in materials science, but it was also a story about incredible demand for computing that drove those advances and made semiconductor research and development profitable. If you want to see a Moore’s-Law-like revolution in energy, then you should be rooting for, and not against, Bitcoin. The fact is that the Bitcoin network, right now, is providing a $200,000 bounty every 10 minutes (the mining reward) to the person who can find the cheapest energy on the planet.
This is ridiculous. The economy is already incentivized to find cheaper electricity by forces far more powerful than Bitcoin. By this logic, you would defend a craze for trying to boil the sea.
If the market had internalized the external health, environmental, and defense costs of nonrenewable energy, we would already have cheap, plentiful renewable energy. But we don't: the market is failing to optimize for factors other than margin. (New Keynesian economics admits market failure, but not non-rationality.)
So, (speculative_valuation - cost) is the margin. Whereas with a stock in a leveraged high-frequency market with shorting, (shareholder_equity - market_cap) is explainable in terms of the market information that is shared.
So, it's actually (~$200K-(n_kwhrs*cost_kwhr)) for whoever wins the block mining lottery (which is about every 10 minutes and can be anyone who's mining).
But the point about Bitcoin maintaining demand for and while we move to competitive lower cost renewable energy and greater efficiency is good.
What we should hope to see is the blockchain industry directly investing in clean energy capacity development in order to rationally minimize their primary costs and maximize environmental sustainability.
It is kind of missing the point though. If everyone was competing to make electrical single-person planes to help people commute to work it would also increase demand for renewable/electrical energy - but can we agree, that just using electrical cars instead of planes is going to take a lot less electricity overall?
Yes, and then energy prices would decrease due to less demand. Blockchain energy usage maintains demand for energy; which keeps prices high enough that production of renewables can profitably compete with nonrenewables while we reach production volumes of solar, wind, and hemp supercapacitors for grid storage.
> Throughout the first half of 2008, oil regularly reached record high prices.[2][3][4][5] Prices on June 27, 2008, touched $141.71/barrel, for August delivery in the New York Mercantile Exchange [...] The highest recorded price per barrel maximum of $147.02 was reached on July 11, 2008.
At that price, there's more demand for renewables (such as electric vehicles and solar panels)
> Since late 2013 the oil price has fallen below the $100 mark, plummeting below the $50 mark one year later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_oil_market_chronology_fr...
... Energy costs and inflation are highly covariate. (Trouble is, CPI All rarely ever goes back down)
Bitcoin's energy use will tend to raise to match the mining profits. As long as both BTC's price and transaction fees keep raising, the energy miners spend will continue to raise. BTC's price is going up due to speculation, and transaction fees due to blocks being full.
Even at current levels, BTC's built in block rewards dominate tx fees (12.50BTC built in + 1.38 tx fees). The 12.5 built in reward is essentially a subsidy for mining.
Ask HN: Which programming language has the best documentation?
Ask HN: Recommended course/website/book to learn data structure and algorithms
I am a full-time Android developer who does most of his programming work in Java. I am a non CS graduate so didn't study Data structure and algorithms course in university so I am not familiar with this subject which is hindering my prospect of getting better programming jobs. There are so many resources out there on this subject that I am unable to decide which one is the best for my case. Could someone please point me out in the right direction. Thanks.
Data Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure
Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
Big O notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation
Big-O Cheatsheet: http://bigocheatsheet.com
Coding Interview University > Data Structures: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university/blob/...
OSSU: Open Source Society University > Core CS > Core Theory > "Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I" [&2] https://github.com/ossu/computer-science/blob/master/README....
"Algorithms, 4th Edition" (2011; Sedgewick, Wayne): https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/
Complexity Zoo > Petting Zoo (P, NP,): https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Petting_Zoo
While perusing awesome-awesomeness [1], I found awesome-algorithms [2] , algovis [3], and awesome-big-o [4].
[1] https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness
[2] https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms
Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice?
The top-voted response is helpful: throwing away constants as in Big-O notation is misleading, average cases aren't the case; Sedgewick Algorthms book.
ORDO: a modern alternative to X.509
There are a number of W3C specs for this type of thing.
Linked Data Signatures (ld-signatures) relies upon a graph canonicalization algorithm that works with any RDF format (RDF/XML, JSON-LD, Turtle,)
> The signature mechanism can be used across a variety of RDF data syntaxes such as JSON-LD, N-Quads, and TURTLE, without the need to regenerate the signature
https://w3c-dvcg.github.io/ld-signatures/
A defined way to transform ORDO to RDF would be useful for WoT graph applications.
WebID can express X509 certs with the cert ontology. {cert:X509Certificate, cert:PGPCertificate,} rdfs:subClassOf cert:Certificate
https://www.w3.org/ns/auth/cert
https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/
ld-signatures is newer than WebID.
(Also, we should put certificates in a blockchain; just like Blockcerts (JSON-LD))
Wine 3.0 Released
Kimbal Musk is leading a $25M mission to fix food in US schools
Spinzero – A Minimal Jupyter Notebook Theme
+1. The Computer Modern serif fonts look legit. Like LaTeX legit.
Now, if we could make the fonts unscalable and put things in two columns (in order to require extra scrolling and 36 character wide almost-compiling copy-and-pasted code samples without syntax highlighting) we'd be almost there!
I searched for Computer Modern fonts and they're all available here: http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/
I am surprised why these beauties are not widely adopted on websites and such. I agree, they just look very disciplined and professional.
I'd hope someday these relics are hosted on Google Fonts.
What does the publishing industry bring to the Web?
Q: What does the publishing industry bring to the Web?
A: PDF hosting, comments, a community of experts
FWIU, Publishing@W3C proposes WPUB [1] instead of PDF or MHTML for 'publishing' http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle .
How do WPUB canonical identifiers (which reference/redirect(?) to the latest version of the resource) work with W3C Web Annotations attached to e.g. sentences within a resource identified with a URI? When the document changes, what happens to the attached comments? This is also a problem with PDFs: with a filename like document-20180111-v01.pdf and a stable(!) URL like http://example.org/document-20180111-v01.pdf, we can add Web Annotations to that URI; but with a new URI, those annotations are lost.
Git is a blockchain
Bitcoin is very much inspired by git; though in terms of immutability it's more similar to mercurial and subversion (git push -f)
Git accepts whatever timestamp a node chooses to add to a commit. This can cause interesting sorts in terms of chronological and topological sort orders.
Without an agreed-upon central git server there is not a canonical graph.
You can use GPG signatures with Git, but you need to provide your own keyserver and then there's still no way to enforce permissions (e.g. who can ALTER, UPDATE, or DELETE which files).
Git is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Not a chain. Blockchains are chains to prevent double-spending (e.g. on a different fork).
Bitcoin was accepted by The Linux Foundation (Linus Torvalds wrote Git): https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/
It's always been a mix of inspiration in my mind:
- Torrent P2P file sharing.
- Git like data structure and protocol
- Immutability from functional programming
- Public key cryptography
Show HN: Convert Matlab/NumPy matrices to LaTeX tables
LaTeX must be escaped in order to prevent LaTeX injection.
AFAIU, numpy.savetxt does not escape LaTeX characters?
Jupyter Notebook rich object display protocol checks for obj._repr_latex_() when converting a Jupyter notebook from .ipynb to LaTeX.
The Pandas _repr_latex_() function calls to_latex(escape=True † ). https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/master/pandas/core...
†* The default value of escape ️ (and a few other presentational parameters) is determined from the display.latex.escape option: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/options.html?hi... *
df = pd.read_csv('filename.csv', ); df.to_latex(escape=True)
Or, with a Jupyter notebook:
df = pd.read_csv('filename.csv', ); df
# $ jupyter convert --to latex filename.ipynb
Wouldn't it be great if there was a LaTeX incantation that allowed for specifying that the referenced dataset URI (maybe optionally displayed also as a table) is a premise of the analysis; with RDFa and/ or JSONLD in addition to LaTeX PDF? That way, an automated analysis tool could identify and at least retrieve the data for rigorous unbiased analyses.
http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle
#StructuredPremises
A Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom
What a great article about using Anki during class in a Language Arts curriculum.
NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Round 1 Submissions
Are there any blogs that talk about what’s required in a crypto algorithm to withstand quantum computing? Is a straightforward increasing the key size enough? Or are there new paradigms explored? Are these algorithms symmetric or asymmetric?
This paper lists a few of the practical concerns for quantum-resistant algos (and proposes an algo that wasn't submitted to NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Round 1):
"Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10377 (~2027?)
A few Quantum Computing and Quantum Algorithm resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16052193
Responsive HTML (arxiv-vanity/engrafo, PLoS,) or Markdown in a Jupyter notebook (stored in a Git repo with a tag and maybe a DOI from figshare or Zenodo) really would be far more useful than comparing LaTeX equations rendered into PDFs.
What are some good resources to learn about Quantum Computing?
Quantum computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing
Quantum algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_algorithm
Quantum Algorithm Zoo: http://math.nist.gov/quantum/zoo/
Jupyter notebooks:
* QISKit/qiskit-tutorial > "Exploring Quantum Information Concepts" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/QISKit/qiskit-tutorial/b...
* jrjohansson/qutip-lectures > "Lecture 0 - Introduction to QuTiP - The Quantum Toolbox in Python" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jrjohansson/qutip-lectur...
http://qutip.org/tutorials.html
* sympy/quantum_notebooks https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/sympy/quantum_notebooks/...
https://github.com/topics/quantum
krishnakumarsekar/awesome-quantum-machine-learning: https://github.com/krishnakumarsekar/awesome-quantum-machine...
arxiv quant-ph: https://arxiv.org/list/quant-ph/recent
Gridcoin: Rewarding Scientific Distributed Computing
In all honesty this is what I've been waiting for in terms of a useful cryptocurrency. Now if we could only decentralize the control of what projects the processing goes towards with smart contracts then we could have a coin with more actual utility. Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
> Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
""" CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home
As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques. """
> Imagine the hash rate of the BTC network going towards some useful calculations.
Unfortunatly BTC mining now runs almost entirely on ASICs that can't be used to compute anything but SHA-256.
Imagine and equivalent amount of computer power in an alternative future. I mean, you're right, and this limitation is a flaw in bitcoin, but you've also missed the point.
It's also hard to call it a flaw in Bitcoin, considering it was an intentional design decision.
Even intentional design decisions can be flawed.
There's a pretty hard limit bounding the optimizability of SHA256. That's why hashcash uses a cryptographic hash function.
There may be - or, very likely are - shortcuts for proof of research better than Grover's; which, when found, will also be very useful for science and medicine. However, that advantage is theoretically destabilizing for a distributed consensus network; which is also a strange conflict in incentives.
Sort of like buying "buy gold" commercials when the market was heading into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
SSL accelerators may benefit from the SHA256 ASIC optimizations incentivized by the bitcoin design.
"""The accelerator provides the RSA public-key algorithm, several widely used symmetric-key algorithms, cryptographic hash functions, and a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator"""
GPU prices are also lower now; probably due to demand pulling volume. The TPS (transactions per second) rate is doing much better these days.
How would you solve the local daretime problem in order with Git and signatures?
Power Prices Go Negative in Germany
The article doesn’t actually answer the questions it purports to answer. Better source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-....
Energy markets are artificial markets designed to create various price signals that result in certain incentives on both generation and demand, subject to numerous constraints. One constraint is that demand and supply must balance. The grid can’t store much energy. Oversupply can cause grid frequency to go above 50/60 Hz, threatening grid stability: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/705. Power prices go negative when there is too much generation capacity online at a given instant, relative to demand. That creates incentives for generators that can shut down (like natural gas) to do so.
Negative power prices are not a good thing for consumers. A negative price in the wholesale electric markets does not mean the electricity is "less than free." Obviously, even wind power or solar always costs positive money to generate in real terms. Instead, it signals a mismatch between generation capacity, storage capacity, and demand. In a grid with adequate storage capacity, negative prices would be extremely rare.
I think you're missing the critical piece of your explanation of why negative prices aren't good for consumers:
The reason that negative power prices look like they would be good for consumers is that it seems like they should lower their monthly bills. But in practice their bill should stay the same, even if there were significant periods during which energy prices were negative. Why? The negative prices don't indicate that the cost of power production is negative for the power company, so the power company is losing money. The power company has to recoup those losses somehow, and they do it by charging more when power prices are positive.
In order to take advantage of negative power prices, a power consumer would have to dynamically increase their power consumption in response to the negative prices. If they have any significant power storage capacity, maybe they could store power and sell it back to the grid when prices go positive, or maybe turn on their mining rig while prices are negative, if they go negative frequently.
I'll just add in some empirical results. German power has risen to be some of the most expensive in Europe since they started the Energiewende. They have very low wholesale prices (driving the coal producers out of business) combined with very high retail prices (might be top 3 in Europe?).
The high retail price appears to be driven by the mechanisms driving the Energiewende ie transition to wind and solar.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
The NYT article reads as though Germany is benefiting from the switch to renewables, and that the only problems are that sometimes there's so much power around that they have to pay people to use it.
It mentions high cost of electricity, and that it's due to fees and "renewable investment costs" but then immediately hand-waves that away because "household energy bills have been rising over all anyway."
When combined with your information above (those hand-wavy fees actually account for fully 50% of the costs, with 24% being the renewables surcharge) it would seem that the NYT is being misleading. It seems they want to convey the idea that the renewables are an immediate good thing for everyone (which I do not take issue with politically) while downplaying the significant costs to consumers. Am I missing something?
If I'm not, then this does nothing but contribute to the current view of American media as being intentionally misleading when it suits their interests.
No, I don't think you're missing something here.
The price for electricity is indeed very high in Germany, rising to new heights with the new year, again.
The problem is, unsurprisingly, regulation and policy, i.e. the fees you already mentioned, and the subsidies for industrial usage, etc.
So, yes, it actually seems that the NYT is misleading here.
Let's leave this as an exercise for the reader, to judge if anyone should really be surprised here.
I always think of this old "Trust, but verify" quibble, and that it is actually based on an old Russian proverb. The irony.. :)
> The price for electricity is indeed very high in Germany
It's not only very high, but the second highest in the world, and we are about to take over the first spot [1]
> The problem is, unsurprisingly, regulation and policy, i.e. the fees you already mentioned, and the subsidies for industrial usage, etc.
The problem are the subsidies for all the green energy. It's not only the direct costs but also the costs for grid interventions (turning on/off capacity), paying for renewables even if they are not producing because there is too much energy available, the huge requirements for new energy lanes from north to south, getting rid of nuclear power etc.
Subsidies for industrial usage is often quoted as increasing the costs by interested parties, but it's also a direct need of the Energiewende, because the economic damage would be gigantic. Unless you want to get the energy intensive factories out of your country, you have to factor in those costs.
> So, yes, it actually seems that the NYT is misleading here.
Yes, as does most media - especially in Germany. Those negative prices are no win for any german. Why else is it, that we will soon pay the highest prices for electricity in the world?
[1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/energiekosten-in-oecd-...
"Several countries in Europe have experienced negative power prices, including Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland."
> Yes, as does most media - especially in Germany. Those negative prices are no win for any german. Why else is it, that we will soon pay the highest prices for electricity in the world?
AFAIU, it's because you're aggressively shaping the energy market in order to reduce health and environmental costs now.
The technical issue here is that batteries are not good enough yet; and [hemp] supercapacitors are not yet at the volume needed to lower the costs. So, maintaining a high price for energy keeps the market competitive for renewables which have positive negative externalities.
Bitcoin is an energy arbitrage
In addition to relocating to where energy is the least expensive, Bitcoin creates incentive for miners to lower the local cost of energy: invest in renewable energy.
Renewable Energy / Clean Energy is now less expensive than alternatives; with continued demand, the margins are at least maintained.
> In addition to relocating to where energy is the least expensive, Bitcoin creates incentive for miners to lower the local cost of energy: invest in renewable energy.
We have lots of direct and effective subsides for nonrenewable energy in the United States. And some for renewables, as well. For example [1] average effective tax rate over all money making companies: 26%
"Coal & Related Energy": 0.69%
"Oil/Gas (integrated)": 8.01%
"Power": 29.22%
"Green and Renewable Energy": 26.42%
[1] "Tax Rates by Sector (US)" (January 2017) http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...
X-posting here from the article's comments:
The price reflects the confidence investors have in the security's ability to meet or exceed inflation and in the information security of the network.
Volatility adds value for algo traders: say the prices are [1, 101, 51, 101, 51, 201]:
(101-1)+(101-51)+(201-51)=300
(201-1)=200
For the average Joe looking at the vested options they're hodling, though, volatility is unfriendly.
When e.g. algo-traders are willing to buy in when the price starts to fall, they're making liquidity; which some exchanges charge less for.
Enigma Catalyst (Zipline) is one way to backtest and live-trade cryptocurrencies algorithmically.
There are now more than 200k pending Bitcoin transactions
At 20 transactions per second it's a delay of 3 hours. (200000/20/60/60)
"The bitcoin network's theoretical maximum capacity sits between 3.3 to 7 transactions per second."
The OT link does say "Transactions Per Second 22.54".
The solutions for this 3 hour backlog of unconfirmed transactions include: implementing SegWit, increasing the blocksize, and Lightning Network.
I think the link counts incoming transactions. I.e. you can always schedule more, but it doesn't mean they're going to be acted on in a reasonable timeframe.
What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
ORMs:
- Are maintainable by a team. "Oh, because that seemed faster at the time."
- Are unit tested: eventually we end up creating at least structs or objects anyway, and then that needs to be the same everywhere, and then the abstraction is wrong because "everything should just be functional like SQL" until we need to decide what you called "the_initializer2".
- Can make it very easy to create maintainable test fixtures which raise exceptions when the schema has changed but the test data hasn't.
- Prevent SQL injection errors by consistently parametrizing queries and appropriately quoting for the target SQL dialect. (One of the Top 25 most frequent vulnerabilities). This is especially important because most apps GRANT both UPDATE and DELETE; if not CREATE TABLE and DROP TABLE to the sole app account.
- Make it much easier to port to a new database; or run tests with SQLite. With raw SQL, you need the table schema in your head and either comprehensive test coverage or to review every single query (and the whole function preceding db.execute(str, *params))
- May be the performance bottleneck for certain queries; which you can identify with code profiling and selectively rewrite by hand if adding an index and hinting a join or lazifying a relation aren't feasible with the non-SQLAlchemy ORM that you must use.
- Should provide a way to generate the query at dev or compile-time.
- Should make it easy to DESCRIBE the query plans that code profiling indicates are worth hand-optimizing (learning SQL is sometimes not the same as learning how a particular database plans a query over tables without indexes)
- Make managing db migrations pretty easy.
- SQLAlchemy really is great. SQLAlchemy has eager loading to solve the N+1 query problem. Django is often more than adequate; and has had prefetch_related() to solve the N+1 query problem since 1.4. Both have an easy way to execute raw queries (that all need to be reviewed for migrations). Both are much better at paging without allocating a ton of RAM for objects and object attributes that are irrelevant now.
- Make denormalizing things from a transactional database with referential integrity into JSON really easy; which webapps and APIs very often need to do.
Is there a good JS ORM? Maybe in TypeScript?
I've used http://bookshelfjs.org/ but I'd stay away from it, only felt cumbersome. No productivity gain.
It's built on top a query builder Knex (http://knexjs.org/) which is decent.
Objection.js and the Knex query builder are excellent. Think ORM light with full access to SQL.
Show HN: An educational blockchain implementation in Python
> It is NOT secure neither a real blockchain and you should NOT use this for anything else than educational purposes.
It would be nice if non-secure parts of implementation or design were clearly marked.
What's the point of education article, if bad examples aren't clearly marked as bad? If MD5 usage is the only issue, author could easily replace it with SHA and get rid of the warning at the start. If there are other issues, how can a reader know which parts to trust?
Even if fixing bad/insecure parts are "left as an exercise for the reader", learning value of the article would be much greater if those parts would be at least pointed at.
OP here.
erikb is spot on in the sibling comment. This hasn't been expert-reviewed, hasn't been audited so I'm pretty confident there is a bug somewhere that I don't know about.
It's educational in the sense that I tried as best a I could to implement the various algorithmic parts (mining, validating blocks & transactions, etc...).
I originally used MD5 because I thought I would do more exploration regarding difficulty and MD5 is faster to compute than SHA. In the end, I didn't do that exploration, so I could easily replace MD5 with SHA. I'll update the notebook to use SHA, but I'm still not gonna remove the warning :)
I'll also try to point out more explicitly which parts I think are not secure.
> I'll also try to point out more explicitly which parts I think are not secure.
Things I've noticed:
* Use of floating point arithmetic.
* Non-reproducible serialization in verify_transaction can produce slightly different, but equivalent JSON, which leads to rejecting transactions if produced JSON is platform-dependent (e.g. CRLFs, spaces vs tabs).
* Miners can perform DoS by creating a pair of blocks referencing each other (recursive call in verify_block is made before any sanity checks or hash checks, so they can modify block's ancestor without worrying about changing its hash).
* mine method can loop forever due to integer overflow.
* Miners can put in block a transaction with output sum greater than input sum - only place where it is checked is in compute_fee and no path from verify_block leads there.
Those are all very good points I didn't think about, thanks for these.
I'll fix the two bugs with verify_block and the possibility for a miner to inject invalid a output > input transaction.
I'll add a note for the 3 others.
For deterministic serialization (~canonicalization), you can use sort_keys=True or serialize OrderedDicts. For deseialization, you'd need object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict.
Most current blockchains sign a binary representation with fixed length fields. In terms of JSON, JSON-LD is for graphs and it can be canonicalized. Blockcerts and Chainpoint are JSON-LD specs:
> Blockcerts uses the Verifiable Claims MerkleProof2017 signature format, which is based on Chainpoint 2.0.
https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-verifier-js/...
FYI, dicts are now ordered by default as of Python 3.6.
That's an implementation detail, and shouldn't be relied upon. If you want an ordered dictionary, you should use collections.OrderedDict.
It's now the spec for 3.6+.
> #python news: @gvanrossum just pronounced that dicts are now guaranteed to retain insertion order. This is the end of a long journey.
https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/941709626545864704
More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/7jyluw/dict_knownor...
OrderedDicts are backwards-compatible and are guaranteed to maintain order after deletion.
Thanks! Simplest explanation I've seen.
Here's an nbviewer link (which, like base58, works on/over a phone): https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/julienr/ipynb_playground...
Note that Bitcoin does two rounds of SHA256 rather than one round of MD5. There's also a "P2P DHT" (peer-to-peer distributed hash table) for storing and retrieving blocks from the blockchain; instead of traditional database multi-master replication and secured offline backups.
> ERROR:root:Invalid transaction signature, trying to spend someone else's money ?
This could be more specific. Where would these types of error messages log to?
My mistake, it's BitTorrent that has a DHT. Instead of finding the most network local peer with the block identified by a (prev_hash, hash) hash table key, the Bitcoin blockchain broadcasts all messages to all nodes; which must each maintain a complete backup of the entire blockchain.
"Protocol documentation" https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation
MSU Scholars Find $21T in Unauthorized Government Spending
Unauthorized federal spending (in these two departments) 1998-2015: $21T
Federal debt (2017): $20T
$ 20,000,000,000,000 USD
Would a blockchain for government expenditures help avoid this type of error?
We already now have https://usaspending.gov ( https://beta.usaspending.gov ) and expenditure line item metadata.
Would having traceable money in a distributed ledger help us keep track of money collected from taxpayers?
Obviously, the volatility of most cryptocurrencies would be disadvantageous for purposes of transferring and accounting for government spending. Isn't there a way to peg a cryptocurrency to the USD; even with Quantitative Easing? How is Quantitative Easing different from just deciding to print trillions more 'coins' in order to counter debt or inflation or deflation; why is the government in debt at all?
re: Quantitative Easing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
Say I have $100 in my Social Security Fund (in very non-aggressive investments which need to meet or exceed inflation) and the total supply of money (including paper notes and numbers in debit and credit columns of various public and private databases) the total supply of money is $1T with $1T in debt; if 1T is printed to pay for that debt, is my $100 in retirement savings then worth $50? Or is it more complex than that?
[deleted]
Universities spend millions on accessing results of publicly funded research
Are there good open source solutions for journal publishing? (HTML abstract, PDFs, comments, ...)?
Yes- quite a few beyond what's already been listed, in fact:
http://www.theoj.org/ https://plos.github.io/ambraproject/index.html https://v4.pubpub.org/
Ambra is being discontinued! http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2017/12/ceo-letter-to-the-communi...
Edit: And theoj doesn't really appear to be maintained anymore either...
> Ambra is being discontinued!
The article mentions the discontinuation of Aperta but nothing about Ambra?
https://plos.github.io/ambraproject/Developer-Overview.html
I'm sorry, I just realised that as well - my mistake.
An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
Part 2 mentions two quantum algorithms that could be used to break Bitcoin (and SSH and SSL/TLS; and most modern cryptographic security systems): Shor's algorithm for factorization and Grover's search algorithm.
Part 2: http://davidbkemp.github.io/QuantumComputingArticle/part2.ht...
Shor's algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm
Grover's algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm
I don't know what heading I'd suggest for something about how concentration of quantum capabilities will create dangerous asymmetry. (That is why we need post-quantum ("quantum resistant") hash, signature, and encryption algorithms in the near future.)
Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them (ECDSA, SHA256)
"Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them (ECDSA, SHA256)" https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.10377/
> […] On the other hand, the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most optimistic estimates.
From https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Post-Quantum-Cryptography :
> NIST has initiated a process to solicit, evaluate, and standardize one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms. Nominations for post-quantum candidate algorithms may now be submitted, up until the final deadline of November 30, 2017.
Project Euler
After hearing about it for years, I decided to start working through Project Euler about two weeks ago. It really is much more about math than programming, although it's a lot of fun to take on the problems with a language that has tail call optimization because so many of the problems involve recurrence relations.
I like that the problems are constructed in a way that usually punishes you for trying to use brute force. Sometimes there's a problem that doesn't have a more elegant solution, though, as if to remind us that brute force often works remarkably well.
I agree with Project Euler being mostly about math. I prefer Codewars for practicing programming or learning a new language.
Euler was a mathematician after all. Now thinking about it I wonder what project Djikstra would look like, or say maybe project Stallman.
There's a Project Rosalind (named after Rosalind Franklin) which is sort of like Project Euler for bioinformatics: http://rosalind.info/about/
I like https://rosalind.info bioinformatics problems because:
- There are problem explanations and an accompanying textbook.
- You can structure the solutions with unit tests that test for known good values.
- There's a graph of problems.
Who’s Afraid of Bitcoin? The Futures Traders Going Short
Wall Street being able to buy Bitcoin might increase demand, but they might also do things that would at least at times amplify sell pressure like panic selling, shorting it, leveraged shorting, margin calls
Statement on Cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings
A little emphasis, focusing on the aftermath from the SEC's July report on the DAO:
> "Following the issuance of the 21(a) Report, certain market professionals have attempted to highlight utility characteristics of their proposed initial coin offerings in an effort to claim that their proposed tokens or coins are not securities. Many of these assertions appear to elevate form over substance. Merely calling a token a “utility” token or structuring it to provide some utility does not prevent the token from being a security."
I think people are viewing this as an attack on crypto, when its actually just common sense. People put too much faith the 'Contract' half of 'Ethereum/Smart Contract'
Basically. Today ICOs are selling tokens as shares of equity in their company, or similar. Which you can then sell on.
The problem is these companies essentially reserve the right to disregard that contract and could then sell their company, domestically or overseas, for cash, without recompensating any token holders.
Securities regulation and law stops that. But the tokens do need to be lawful securities in order for the court to recognize them.
Otherwise how can the court help you, and who else is going to help you?
> I think people are viewing this as an attack on crypto, when its actually just common sense.
> […] The problem is these companies essentially reserve the right to disregard that contract and could then sell their company, domestically or overseas, for cash, without recompensating any token holders.
> Securities regulation and law stops that. But the tokens do need to be lawful securities in order for the court to recognize them.
This. IRS regards coins and tokens as capital gains taxable things regardless of whether they qualify as securities. SEC exists to protect investors from scams and unfair dealing. In order to protect investors, SEC regulates issuance of securities.
Ask HN: How do you stay focused while programming/working?
I often find myself "needing" to take a mini-break after just a few minutes of concerted effort while coding. In particular, this often occurs after I've made a tiny breakthrough, prompting me to reward myself by checking Twitter or HN. This bad habit quickly derails any momentum. What are some tips to increase focus stamina and avoid distraction?
It's not exactly new and exciting, but I found that listening to calm, instrumental music helps me focus. Mostly Ambient. If you do not like electronic music, Stars Of The Lid or Bohren & Der Club Of Gore are very much worth checking out.
Also, https://mynoise.net/ has worked wonders for me.
In both cases, it seems that unstructured audio input, like, occupies the parts of my mind that would otherwise distract me.
> It's not exactly new and exciting, but I found that listening to calm, instrumental music helps me focus. Mostly Ambient.
Same. Lounge, Ambient, Chillout, Chillstep (https://di.fm has a bunch of great streams. SoundCloud and MixCloud have complete replayable sets, too.)
I've heard that videogame soundtracks are designed to not be distracting; to help focus.
A Hacker Writes a Children's Book
The rhymes and illustrations look great! Is there a board book edition?
Other great STEM and computers books for kids:
"A is for Array"
"Lift-the-Flap Computers and Coding"
"Computational Fairy Tales"
"Hello Ruby: Adventures in Coding"
"Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction To Programming"
"Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things"
"Rosie Revere, Engineer"
"Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine"
"HTML for Babies: Volume 1 of Web Design for Babies"
"What Do You Do With a Problem?"
"What Do You Do With an Idea?"
"ABCs of Mathematics", "The Pythagorean Theorem for Babies", "Non-Euclidian Geometry for Babies", "Introductory Calculus for Infants", "ABCs of Physics", "Statistical Physics for Babies", "Netwonian Physics for Babies", "Optical Physics for Babies", "General Relativity for Babies", "Quantum Physics for Babies", "Quantum Information for Babies", "Quantum Entanglement for Babies"
"ELI5": "Explain like I'm five"
Someone should really make a list of these.
Ask HN: Do ISPs have a legal obligation to not sell minors' web history anymore?
I guess COPPA is still in place and in theory it applies to ISPs, although they may be allowed to assume that all traffic from a household comes from the bill payer who is presumably over 13.
http://kellywarnerlaw.com/childrens-online-privacy-protectio...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/31/15138526/isp-privacy-bill...
Tech luminaries call net neutrality vote an 'imminent threat'
> “The current technically-incorrect order discards decades of careful work by FCC chairs from both parties, who understood the threats that Internet access providers could pose to open markets on the Internet.”
Paid prioritization is that threat.
Again, streaming video content for all ages is not more important than online courses.
Ask HN: Can hashes be replaced with optimization problems in blockchain?
CureCoin.
From https://curecoin.net/knowledge-base/about-curecoin/what-is-c... :
> Curecoin allows owners of both ASIC and GPU/CPU hardware to earn. Curecoin puts ASICs to work at what they are good at–securing a blockchain, while it puts GPUs and CPUs to work with work items that can only be done on them–protein folding. While still having a secure blockchain, it supports, and thus is supported by, scientific research.
...
From "CureCoin Reaches #1 Ranking on Folding@home" https://www.newswire.com/news/bio-research-loves-curecoin-ga... :
> As of the afternoon of August 29, 2017 (Eastern Time), the Curecoin Team 224497 earned the world's #1 rank on Stanford's Folding@home - a protein folding simulation Distributed Computing Network (DCN). In a little over 3 years, the team (including our merge-folding partners at Foldingcoin) collectively produced 160 billion points worth of molecular computations to support research in the areas of cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Infectious Disease as well as helping scientists uncover new molecular dynamics through groundbreaking computational techniques.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15843795 :
> Gridcoin (Berkeley 2013) is built on Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Research. Gridcoin is used as payment for computing resources contributed to BOINC.
> I doubt that volatility would be welcome on the Gridcoin blockchain: Wikipedia lists "6.5% Inflation. 1.5% Interest + 5% Research Payments APR" under the Supply Growth infobox attribute.
Ask HN: What could we do with all the mining power of Bitcoin? Fold Protein?
Instead of buzzing SHA-512 in circles like busy bees ad infinitum, is there any way we can use these calculations productively?
Instead of algo-trading the stock markets?!
There are a number of distributed computing projects (e.g. SETI@home): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...
The Ethereum White Paper lists a number of applications for blockchains: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper
(BitCoin is built on SHA-256, Ethereum is built on Keccak-256 (~SHA-3))
Proof-of-Stake is a lower energy alternative to Proof-of-Work with tradeoffs: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
Unfortunately, IDK of another way to find secure consensus (blockchains are consensus protocols) in a DDOS-resistant way with unsolved problems?
> Unfortunately, IDK of another way to find secure consensus (blockchains are consensus protocols) in a DDOS-resistant way with unsolved problems?
Gridcoin (Berkeley 2013) is built on Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Research. Gridcoin is used as payment for computing resources contributed to BOINC.
I doubt that volatility would be welcome on the Gridcoin blockchain: Wikipedia lists "Supply growth 6.5% Inflation. 1.5% Interest + 5% Research Payments APR" under the Supply Growth infobox attribute.
No CEO needed: These blockchain platforms will let ‘the crowd’ run startups
How much energy does Bitcoin mining really use?
The Actual FCC Net Neutrality Repeal Document. TLDR: Read Pages 82-87 [pdf]
Here are some links to the relevant antitrust laws:
Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp. (1985) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Skiing_Co._v._Aspen_High....
Transparency in network management and paid prioritization practices and agreements will be relevant.
"We find that antitrust law, in combination with the transparency rule we adopt, is particularly well-suited to addressing any potential or actual anticompetitive harms that may arise from paid prioritization arrangements." (p.147)
If antitrust law is sufficient, as you've found, there would be no need for Title II Common Carrier regulation in any industry.
We can call phone numbers provided by any company at the same rate because phone companies are regulated as Title II Common Carriers. ISPs are also common carriers.
"Public airlines, railroads, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, internet service providers,[3] cruise ships, motor carriers (i.e., canal operating companies, trucking companies), and other freight companies generally operate as common carriers."
The 5 most ridiculous things the FCC says in its new net neutrality propaganda
> The Federal Communications Commission put out a final proposal last week to end net neutrality. The proposal opens the door for internet service providers to create fast and slow lanes, to block websites, and to prioritize their own content. This isn’t speculation. It’s all there in the text.
Great. Payola. Thanks Verizon!
Does the FTC have the agreement information needed to hear the anti-trust cases that are sure to result from what are now complaints to the FCC (an organization with network management expertise) being redirected to the FTC?
Title II is the appropriate policy set for ISPs; regardless of how lucrative horizontal integration with content producers seems.
FCC's Pai, addressing net neutrality rules, calls Twitter biased
No. Censoring hate speech by banning people who are verbally assaulting others (in violation of Terms of Service that they agreed to) is a very different concern than requiring common carriers to equally prioritize bits.
If we extend "you must allow people to verbally assault others (because free speech applies to the government)" to TV and radio, what do we end up with?
Note that the FCC fines non-cable TV (broadcast radio and TV) for cursing on air. See "Obscene, Indecent and Profane Broadcasts" https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
How can you ask social media companies to do something about fake news (the vast majority of which served to elect the current administration (which nominated this FCC chairman)) while also lambasting them for upholding their commitment to providing a hate-free experience for net citizens and paying advertisers?
"Open Internet": No blocking. No throttling. No paid prioritization.
It would be easier for us to understand the "Open Internet" rules if the proposed "Restoring Internet Freedom" page wasn't crudely pasted over (redirected to from) the page describing the current Open Internet rules. www.fcc.gov/general/open-internet (current policy) now redirects to www.fcc.gov/restoring-internet-freedom (proposed policy).
ISPs blocking, throttling, or paid-prioritizing Twitter, Netflix, Fox, or CNN for everyone is a different concern than responding to individuals who are threatening others with hate speech.
The current policy ("Open Internet") means that you can use the bandwidth cap that you pay for for whatever legal content you please.
The proposed policy ("Restoring Internet Freedom") means that internet businesses will need to pay every ISP in order to not be slower than the big guys who can afford to pay-to-play (~"payola"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
A curated list of Chaos Engineering resources
Never having heard off 'Chaos Engineering', this seems like a bad case of 'Cargo Cult Engineering'.
That starts with the term 'chaos', which has a well-defined meaning in Chaos Theory, where it is quite obviously borrowed from: small changes in input lead to large changes in output. Neither distributed systems in general, and especially not the sort of system this engineering strives to build, fit that definition. In fact, they are the exact opposite: every part of a typical web stack is already build to mitigate changing demands such as traffic peaks or attacks.
The mumbo jumbo around "defining a steady state" and "disproving the null hypothesis" seems like a veneer of sciency on a rather well-known concept: testing.
A supreme court justice once said: "Good writing is a $10 thought in a 5 cent sentence". This is the opposite.
"Resilience Engineering" would be a good alternative term for these failure scenario simulations and analyses.
Glossary of Systems Theory > A > Adaptive capacity:
> Adaptive capacity: An important part of the resilience of systems in the face of a perturbation, helping to minimise loss of function in individual human, and collective social and biological systems
Technology behind Bitcoin could aid science, report says
Bloom is working on non-academic credit building and scoring.
Hyperledger brings together many great projects and tools which have numerous applications in science and industry.
Is a blockchain necessary? Could we instead just sign JSONLD records with ld-signatures and store them in an eventually or strongly consistent database we all contribute resources to synchronizing and securing?
That's just the centralization or decentralization question.
We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data.
Less nodes you need to trust the better, in a centralized solution where everyone can contribute you need to be able to trust everyone.
In a decentralized system where everyone can contribute, you don't need to trust anyone but give up benefits of centralization such as speed, performance and usability.
> We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data.
There are plenty of ways to minimize trust required with traditional cryptography though, this is not all or nothing, we have been doing this since PGP. You can get the overwhelming majority of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.
But how else are you going to hype an ICO with claims about the size of a market and get people who don't understand how blockchains work to give your their BTC/ETH?
Git hash function transition plan
> Some hashes under consideration are SHA-256, SHA-512/256, SHA-256x16, K12, and BLAKE2bp-256.
Not sure what K12 is (Keccak?), but BLAKE2 is a very attractive option.
Vintage Cray Supercomputer Rolls Up to Auction
Google is officially 100% sun and wind powered – 3.0 gigawatts worth
+1000.
TIL this is called "Corporate Renewable Energy Procurement". https://www.google.com/search?q=Corporate+Renewable+Energy+P...
PPA: Power Purchase Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_purchase_agreement
Interactive workflows for C++ with Jupyter
QuantStack/xeus-cling https://github.com/QuantStack/xeus-cling
QuantStack/xwidgets https://github.com/QuantStack/xwidgets
QuantStack/xplot (bqplot) https://github.com/QuantStack/xplot
Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle Says ‘Avoid Bitcoin Like the Plague’
Over the past 7 years, Bitcoin has outperformed every security and portfolio that Jack Bogle has recommended.
This is pretty disrespectful to Jack Bogle.
Vanguard is almost singlehandedly responsible for returning trillions of dollars of costs, in the form of fees and underperformance by active managers, back to investors. Millions of investors have benefited.
Bitcoin has been a bubble since $1 and $100 to these people.
What evidence is there that it isn't a bubble? People buy Bitcoin only because they think they can sell it higher. Eventually, you will run out of greater fools.
Nasdaq Plans to Introduce Bitcoin Futures
My guess is that this is probably pretty meaningless.
There are a few things going against them.
- The CBOE and CME are both much larger futures exchanges and are going to be offering futures first
- since you can't net out futures contracts from different exchanges this means they tend to become winner take all
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person.
This might be interesting as one of the things that everyone is worried about is price manipulation.
If you haven't thought about how futures work with respect to margin and marking at the end of the trading day you need to know that you can be required to deposit more money into your margin account if the futures trade moves against you on any given day.
This means the marking price is very important and lost of institutional money is worried that the exchanges are easy to manipulate.
see: http://openmarkets.cmegroup.com/3785/understanding-margin-ch...
> Nasdaq’s product will reinvest proceeds from the spin-off back into the original bitcoin in a way meant to make the process more seamless for traders, the person said.
This is awesome,, right now the CBOE and CME both have punted on the question of forks saying, they'll have a best efforts to figure it out.
> One way Nasdaq seeks to differentiate itself seems to be in the amount of data it uses for pricing the digital currency contracts. VanEck Associates Corp., which recently withdrew plans for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, will supply the data used to price the contracts, pulling figures from more than 50 sources, according to the person. That appears to exceed CME’s plan to use four sources, and Cboe’s one. Nasdaq’s contracts will be cleared by Options Clearing Corp., the person said.
BitMEX bitcoin futures are already online. IDK how many price sources they pull?
Aren't there a few other companies already selling Bitcoin futures?
In general, when the CME enters a market for futures, they take all of the air out of the room. I don't think it's realistic to believe NASDAQ can compete with them.
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/935900326007328768
Well John McAfee thinks bitcoin will hit 1 million by 2020.
Pump and dumpers gonna pump and dump. https://medium.com/@DEFCON_2015/why-mgt-was-delisted-from-ny...
Or, large investment banking houses will step in and create naked shorting opportunities to inflate sell pressure creating 'death spirals' to drive prices down and scoop them up and extreme discounts. This happens in the traditional public markets everyday.
> Or, large investment banking houses will step in and create naked shorting opportunities to inflate sell pressure creating 'death spirals' to drive prices down and scoop them up and extreme discounts. This happens in the traditional public markets everyday.
Is there a term for this?
Yes, this can happen in a few different ways and is the reason why Ycombinator created SAFEs. When you have a public company you will get offers for what are called "credit lines", "debt financing" or "convertible notes". They are traditionally used to create death spirals https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/deathspiralbond.... as the size of your float increases by you, executive director (CEO/CFO), as a public company "issuing" more stock to cover the loan. The more you issue, the less you're worth until somebody comes along scoops you up and re-engineers the cap table which is a restructuring. However, manipulation can occur within institutions as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=KasianFranks&next=14...
Ask HN: Where do you think Bitcoin will be by 2020?
I have a friend who believes it will be $100,000 per BitCoin and his reasoning is 'supply and demand'.
There will be around 18M bitcoins in 2020. [1][2]
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply
This paper [3] suggests we'll be needing to upgrade to quantum-secure hash functions instead of ECDSA before 2027.
[3] "Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them" https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10377
Hopefully, Ethereum will have figured out a Proof of Stake [4] solution for distributed consensus which is as resistant to DDOS as Proof of Work; but with less energy consumption (thereby, unfortunately or fortunately, un-incentivizing clean energy as a primary business goal).
[4] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
Ask HN: Why would anyone share trading algorithms and compare by performance?
I was speaking with a person years my senior awhile back, and sharing information about the Quantopian platform (which allows users to backtest and share trading algorithms); and he asked me "why would anyone share their trading algorithms [if they're making any money]?"
I tried "to help each other improve their performance". Is there a better way to explain to someone who spends their time reading forums with no objective performance comparisons over historical data why people would help each other improve their algorithmic trading algorithms?
Catalyst, like Quantopian, is also built on top of Zipline; but for cryptocurrencies. https://enigmampc.github.io/catalyst/example-algos.html
Zipline (backtesting and live trading of algorithms with initialize(context) and handle_data(context, data) functions; with the SPY S&P 500 ETF as a benchmark) https://github.com/quantopian/zipline
Pyfolio (for objectively comparing the performance of trading strategies over time) https://github.com/quantopian/pyfolio
...
"Community Algorithms Migrated to Quantopian 2" https://www.quantopian.com/posts/community-algorithms-migrat...
- "Reply to minimum variance w/ contrast" seems to far outperform the S&P 500.
Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?
Can you please point me to some papers that you consider very influential for your work or that you believe they played significant role on how we structure our software nowdays?
"The Architecture of Open Source Applications" Volumes I & II http://aosabook.org/en/
"Manifesto for Agile Software Development" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#The...
"Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/
Fowler > Publications ("Refactoring ",) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler#Publications
"Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (GoF book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns
.
UNIX Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Plan 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
## Distributed Systems
CORBA > Problems and Criticism (monolithic standards, oversimplification,): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A...
Bulk Synchronous Parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel
Paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)
Raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) #Safety
CAP theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
Keeping a Lab Notebook [pdf]
I'd love to hear some thoughts about keeping a "lab notebook" for ML experiments. I use Jupyter Notebooks when playing around with different ML models, and I find that it really helps to document my thought process with notes and comments. It also seems that the ML workflow is very 'experiment' driven. I'm always thinking "Hm, I think if I tweak this hyperparameter this way, or adjust this layer this way, then I'll get a better result because X". Thus, I have a bit of a hypothesis and proposed experiment. I run that model, and see if it improved or not.
Then, I run into an issue where I can either: 1. overwrite the original model with my new hyperparameters/design and re-run and analyze or 2. keep adding to the same notebook "page" with a new hypothesis/test/analysis loop, thus making the notebook pretty large. With number 1, I often want to backtrack and re-reference how a previous experiment went, but I lose that history. With number 2, it seems to get big pretty quickly, and coming back to the same notebook requires more setup, and "searching" the history gets more cumbersome.
Does anyone try using a separate notebook page for each experiment, maybe with a timestamp or "version"? Or is there a better way to do this in a single notebook? I am thinking that something like "chapters" could help me here, and it seems like this extension might help me: https://github.com/minrk/ipython_extensions#table-of-content...
These are ASCII-sortable:
0001_Introduction.ipynb
0010_Chapter-1.ipynb
ISO8601 w/ UTC is also ASCII sortable.
# Jupyter notebooks as lab notebooks
## Disadvantages
### Mutability
With a lab notebook, you can cross things out but they're still there.
- [ ] ENH: Copy cell and mark as don't execute (or wrap with ```language\n``` and change the cell type to markdown)
- [ ] ENH: add a 'Save and {git,} Commit' shortcut
CoCalc (was: SageMathCloud) has (somewhat?) complete notebook replay with a time slider; and multi-user collaborative editing. ("Time-travel is a detailed history of all your edits and everything is backed up in consistent snapshots.")
### Timestamps
You must add timestamps by hand; i.e. as #comments or markdown cells.
- [ ] ENH: add a markdown cell with a timestamp (from a configurable template) (with a keyboard shortcut)
### Project files
You must manage the non-.ipynb sources separately. (You can create a new file or folder. You can just drag and drop to upload. You can open a shell tab to `git status diff commit` and `git push`, if the Jupyter/JupyterHub/CoCalc instance has network access to e.g. GitLab or GitHub)
## Advantages
### Reproducibility Executable I/O cells
The version_information and/or watermark extensions will inline the software versions that were installed when the notebook was last run
Dockerfile for OS config
Conda environment.yml (and/or pip requirements.txt and/or pipenv Pipfile) for further software dependencies
BinderHub can rebuild a docker image on receipt of a webhook from a got repo, push the built image to a docker image repository, and then host prepared Jupyter instances (with Kubernetes) which contain (and reproducibly archive) all of the preinstalled prerequisites.
Diff: `git diff`, `nbdime`
### Publishing
You can generate static HTML, HTML slides with RevealJS, interactive HTML slides with RISE, executable source with comments (e.g. a .py file), LaTeX, and PDF with 'Save as' or `jupyter-convert --to`. You can also create slides with nbpresent.
MyBinder.org and Azure Notebooks have badges for e.g. a README.md or README.rst which launch a project executably in a docker instance hosted in a cloud. CoCalc and Anaconda Cloud also provide hosted Jupyter Notebook projects.
You can template a gradable notebook with nbgrader.
GitHub renders .ipynb notebooks as HTML. Nbviewer renders .ipynb notebooks as HTML.
There are more than 90 Jupyter Kernels for languages other than Python.
https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...
How to teach technical concepts with cartoons
There's not a Wikipedia page for "visual metaphor", but there are pages for "visual rhetoric" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_rhetoric and "visual thinking" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
Negative space can be both meaningful and useful later on.
I learned about visual thinking and visual metaphor in application to business communications from "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/
Fact Checks
Indeed, fact checking systems are only as good as the link between identity credentialing services and a person.
http://schema.org/ClaimReview (as mentioned in this article) is a good start.
A few other approaches to be aware of:
"Reality Check is a crowd-sourced on-chain smart contract oracle system" [built on the Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain]. https://realitykeys.github.io/realitycheck/docs/html/
And standards-based approaches are not far behind:
W3C Credentials Community Group https://w3c-ccg.github.io/
W3C Verifiable Claims Working Group https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/
W3C Verifiable News https://github.com/w3c-ccg/verifiable-news
In terms of verifying (or validating) subjective opinions, correlational observations, and inferences of causal relations; #LinkedMetaAnalyses of documents (notebooks) containing structured links to their data as premises would be ideal. Unfortunately, PDF is not very helpful in accomplishing that objective (in addition to being a terrible format for review with screen reader and mobile devices): I think HTML with RDFa (and/or CSVW JSONLD) is our best hope of making at least partially automated verification of meta analyses a reality.
DHS orders agencies to adopt DMARC email security
From https://www.cyberscoop.com/dhs-dmarc-mandate/ :
> By Jan. 2018, all federal agencies will be required to implement DMARC across all government email domains.
> Additionally, by Feb. 2018, those same agencies will have to employ Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) for all .gov websites, which ensures enhanced website certifications.
The electricity for 1BTC trade could power a house for a month
The article seems to imply that a 1BTC transaction requires 200kWh of energy.
First, what is the source for that number?
Second, what is the business interest of the quoted individual? Are they promoting competing services?
Third, how much energy does the supposed alternative really take, by comparison?
How much energy do these aspects of said business operations require:
- Travel to and from the office for n employees
- Dry cleaning for n employees' work clothes
- Lights for an office of how many square feet
- Fraud investigations in hours worked, postal costs, wait times, CPU time and bandwidth to try and fix data silos' ledgers' transaction ids and time skew; with a full table JOIN on data nobody can only have for a little while from over here and over there
- Desktop machines' idle hours
- Server machines' idle hours
With low cost clean energy, these businesses are profitable; with a very different cost structure than traditional banking and trading.
PAC Fundraising with Ethereum Contracts?
I'll cc this here with formatting changes (extra \n and ---) for Hacker News:
---
### Background
- PAC: Political Action Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee
- https://github.com/holographicio/awesome-token-sale
### Questions
- Is Civic PAC fundraising similar to e.g. a Crowdsale or a CappedCrowdsale or something else entirely, in terms of ERC20 OpenZeppelin solidity contracts?
- Would it be worth maintaining an additional contract for [PAC] "fundraising" with terminology that campaigns can understand; or a terminology map?
- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the risks of a token sale for a PAC?
--- Is there any way to check for donors' citizenship? (When/Where is it necessary to check donors' citizenship (with credit/debit cards or cryptocoins/cryptotokens?))
- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the costs of a token sale for a PAC?
--- How much gas would such a contract require?
- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the benefits of a token sale for a PAC?
---- Lower transaction fees than credit/debit cards?
---- Time limit (practicality, marketing)
---- Cap ("we only need this much")
---- Refunds in the event of […]
### Objectives
- Comply with all local campaign finance laws
--- Collect citizenship information for a Person
--- Collect citizenship information for an Organization 'person'
- Ensure that donations hold value
- Raise funds
- Raise funds up to a cap
- (Optionally?) collect names and contact information ( https://schema.org/Person https://schema.org/Organization )
- Optionally refund if the cap is not met
- Optionally change the cap midstream
- Optionally cancel for a specified string and/or URL reason
Here’s what you can do to protect yourself from the KRACK WiFi vulnerability
> But first, let’s clarify what an attacker can and cannot do using the KRACK vulnerability. The attacker can intercept some of the traffic between your device and your router. Attackers can’t obtain your Wi-Fi password using this vulnerability. They can just look at your traffic. It’s like sharing the same WiFi network in a coffee shop or airport.
From reading the articles:
( https://github.com/vanhoefm/krackattacks ; which is watch-able )
> Against these encryption protocols, nonce reuse enables an adversary to not only decrypt, but also to forge and inject packets.
https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/228519
> Key reuse facilitates arbitrary packet decryption and injection, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, or the replay of unicast, broadcast, and multicast frames.
The Solar Garage Door – A Possible Alternative to the Emergency Generator
Is it possible to apply the https://solarwindow.com ($WNDW) glass coating to a non-glass garage door?
Using the Web Audio API to Make a Modem
Ask HN: How to introduce someone to programming concepts during 12-hour drive?
I won't go into details to keep this brief, but I'm going to spend a week with this client of mine's kit, and I'm supposed to teach him enough about programming for him to figure out if it's something he might be interested in pursuing.
He's about 20, and still struggling to finish high school, but he's smart (although perhaps a little weird).
I thought about introducing him to touch typing just to get a useful skill out of this regardless of the outcome. Then, I thought that during this week I'd teach him HTML and enough CSS to see what's used for. I'm thinking that if he gets excited about typing code and seeing things happening he'll want to study more and learn more advanced stuff in the future and perhaps even make it his profession (this is what my client hopes will happen).
Now, part of this trip is a 12-hour drive. I thought I could use this time to introduce him to simple programming concepts. For instance, if asked to list all steps involved in starting a car, most people would say:
- turn key - start car
That could turn into an infinite loop, though. A better way would be:
- turn key - start car - if it starts, exit - if it doesn't start, repeat 3 more times - if it still won't start, call a mechanic
Stuff like this—that anyone can understand, that can be explained without looking at a computer, but that it's still useful.
Any idea what I could talk about? Examples, anecdotes, anything.
Computational Thinking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking
> 1. Problem formulation (abstraction);
> 2. Solution expression (automation);
> 3. Solution execution and evaluation (analyses).
This is a good skills matrix to start with:
http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
https://competency-checklist.appspot.com
"Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist"
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/index.html
K12CS Framework is good for all ages:
For syntax, learnxinmyminutes:
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python3/
https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/
Good one, but that's kind of hard to do while driving, though.
To get a job, "Coding Interview University":
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
This is actually pretty awesome :-)
Start simple, start small and start with something he's interested in.
There's the part about helping him discover whether he likes to create things through computers and whether he actually believes he can create things through computers. You're spot on that he might be interested about typing code but you'll have to figure out whether he's a visual person, a logical person, etc. For example, I got started learning to code once I understood what code can do to help automate things. A friend of mine got interested after seeing what websites he can build. Everyone is unique so you'll have to learn about him as you're trying to teach.
Good advice. Do you have any tip of how to figure out if he's a visual or logical person, etc.?
You can learn about a person's internal representation by asking Clean Questions and listening to the metaphors that they share; in order to avoid transferring and inferring your own biased internal representation (MAPS: metaphors, assumptions, paradigms or sensations).
It's worth reading this whole article (and e.g. "Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Language
"Metaphors We Live By" explains conceptual metaphor ("internal representation" w/ Clean Language / Symbolic Modeling) and lists quite a few examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
Our human brains tend to infer Given, When, Then "rules" which we only later reason about in terms of causal relations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given-When-Then
It's generally accepted that software is more correct when we start with tests:
Given : When : Then :: Precondition : Command : Postcondition https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...
... "Criteria for Success and Test-Driven-Development" https://westurner.github.io/2016/10/18/criteria-for-success-...
I believe it was Feynman who introduced the analogy:
desktop : filing cabinet :: RAM : hard drive
Here's a video: "Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture" (1985) https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA
Somewhere in my comments here, I talk about topologically sorting CS concepts; in what little time I spent, I think I suggested "Constructor Theory" (Deutsch 201?) as a first physical principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
> Constructor Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory#Outline
Task, Constructor, Computation Set, Computation Medium, Information Medium, Super information Medium (quantum states)
The filing cabinet and disk storage are information mediums / media.
How is the desktop / filling cabinet metaphor mismatched or limiting?
There may be multiple desktops (RAM/Cache/CPU; Computation mediums): is the problem parallelizable?
Consider a resource scheduling problem: there are multiple rooms, multiple projectors, and multiple speakers. Rooms and projectors cost so much. Presenters could use all of an allotted period of time; or they could take more or less time. Some presentations are logically sequence able (SHOULD/MUST be topologically sorted). Some presentations have a limited amount of time for questions afterward.
Solution: put talks online with an infinite or limited amount of time for asynchronous questions/comments
Solution: in between attending a presentation, also research and share information online (concurrent / asynchronous)
And, like a hash map, make the lookup time for a given resource with a type(s) ~O(1) with URLs (URIs) that don't change. (Big-O notation for computational complexity)
Resource scheduling (SLURM,): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15267146
American Red Cross Asks for Ham Radio Operators for Puerto Rico Relief Effort
Zello trended up during hurricane Harvey:
> Push the button for instant, radio-style talk on any Wi-Fi or data plan.
> Access public and private channels.
> Choose button for push-to-talk.
> [...] available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows PC and Windows Phone 8
...
> Connects to existing LMR radio systems
> All Radio Technologies
> Interconnect conventional and trunked analog FM, ETSI DMR, ETSI TETRA, MotoTRBO, APCO P25 FDMA, and NXDN.
They probably need some batteries, turbines, and solar cell chargers to get WiFi online?
> This phone needs no battery
http://www.techradar.com/news/this-phone-needs-no-battery
> [...] “We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,” said Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW and co-author on a paper describing the technology.
> Instead, the phone pulls power from its environment - either from ambient radio signals harvested by an antenna, or ambient light collected by a solar cell the size of a grain of rice. The device consumes just 3.5 microwatts of power during use.
> [...] “And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cellphone coverage everywhere."
(Also trending on HackerNews right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350799 )
That's not at all useful, nor is it relevant.
Probably also worth mentioning Shelterpods and Responsepods for disaster relief deployments to this crowd; they're designed to take a lot of wind and rain:
https://store.advancedsheltersystemsinc.com/?___store=shelte...
https://store.advancedsheltersystemsinc.com/responsepod/vip/...
Technical and non-technical tips for rocking your coding interview
This is also a great resource, if you're into studying yourself:
"Coding Interview University" https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Django 2.0 alpha
Can someone who uses Django, review this release? What are the most anticipated changes etc?
There's new `path()` as alternative to `url()` that allows one to use easier to remember syntax for url params like `<int:id>` instead of past `(?P<year>[0-9]{4})`. But if you need it, there's still `url()` for you to use power of regex in your urls.
And your shop still runs on Py2k, you'll need to move to Py3k to use Django 2.0. This also means that websockets support will not land on Django version that works for Py2k.
</year></int:id>How is <int:id> identical to (?P<year>[0-9]{4})? I'm talking about the {4}. Just an error in their blog post?</year></int:id>
Does it support negative long integers?
EDIT: I am without actual internet or mobile tethering and an unable to `git clone https://github.com/django/django -b stable/2.0.x` and check out this convenient new feature.
It's still regex under the hood, the 'int' is just syntactic sugar for "[0-9]+":
https://github.com/django/django/blob/dda37675db0295baefef37...
Ask HN: What is the best way to spend my time as a 17-year-old who can code?
I'm 17 and I can code at a relatively high level. I'm not really sure what I should be doing. I would like to make some money, but is it more useful to me to contribute to open-source software to add to my portfolio or to find people who will hire me? Even most internships require you to be enrolled as a CS major at a college. I've also tried things like Upwork, but generally people aren't willing to hire a 17-year-old and the pay is very bad. Thanks for any advice!
My GitHub is: https://github.com/meyer9
Pick a #GlobalGoal or three that you find interesting and want to help solve.
Apply Computational Thinking to solving a given problem. Break it down into completeable tasks.
You can work on multiple canvasses at once: sometimes it's helpful to let things simmer on the back burner while you're taking care of business. Just don't spread yourself too thin: everyone deserves your time.
Remember ERG theory (and Maslow's Hierarchy). Health and food and shelter are obviously important.
Keep lists of good ideas. Notecards, git, a nice fresh blank sheet of paper for the #someday folder. What to call it isn't important yet. "Thing1" and "Thing2".
You can spend time developing a portfolio, building up your skills, and continuing education. You can also solve a problem now.
You don't need a co-founder at first. You do need to plan to be part of a team: other people are good at other things; and that's the part they most enjoy doing.
Democrats fight FCC's plans to redefine “broadband” from 25+ to 10+ Mbps
The FCC redefined broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up as reported in the 2015 Broadband Progress Report (from 4Mbps/1Mbps in 2010).
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr...
Ask HN: Any detailed explanation of computer science
Any detailed easily understandable explanation of computer science from bottom-up like Feynman's lectures explanation of physics.
Bits
Boolean algebra
Boolean logic gates / (set theory)
CPU / cache
Memory / storage
Data types (signed integers, floats, decimals, strings), encoding
...
A bottom-up (topologically sorted) computer science curriculum (a depth-first traversal of a Thing graph) ontology would be a great teaching resource.
One could start with e.g. "Outline of Computer Science", add concept dependency edges, and then topologically (and alphabetically or chronologically) sort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
There are many potential starting points and traversals toward specialization for such a curriculum graph of schema:Things/skos:Concepts with URIs.
How to handle classical computation as a "collapsed" subset of quantum computation? Maybe Constructor Theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
From "Resources to get better at theoretical CS?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281776 :
- "Open Source Society University: Path to a self-taught education in Computer Science!" https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
This is also great:
- "Coding Interview University" https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
Neither these nor the ACM Curriculum are specifically topologically sorted.
Ask HN: What algorithms should I research to code a conference scheduling app
I'm interested in writing a utility to assist with scheduling un-conferences. Lets take the following situation for an example:
* 4 conference rooms across 4 time slots, for a total of 16 talks.
* 30 proposed talks
* 60 total participants
Each user would be given 4(?)votes, un-ranked. (collection of the votes is a separate topic) Voting is not secret, and we don't need mathematically precise results. The goal is just to minimize conflicts.
The algorithm would have the following data to work with:
* List of talks with the following properties:
* presenter participant ID
* the participant ID for each user that voted for the talk
* fills all time slots with the highest voted topics
* attempts to avoid overlapping votes for any particular given user in a given time slot
* attempt to not schedule a presenter's talk during a talk they are interested in.
* Sugar on top: implement ranked preferences
My question: where do I start to research the algorithms that will be helpful? I know this is a huge project, but I have a year to work on it. I'm also not overly concerned with performance, but would like to keep it from being exponential.
Thank you for any references you can provide!
Resource scheduling, CSP (Constraint Satisfaction programming)
CSP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_satisfaction_proble...
Scheduling (production processes):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(production_process...
Scheduling (computing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)
... To an OS, a process thread has a priority and sometimes a CPU affinity.
What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?
- The internet (TCP/IP) and world wide web (HTML, HTTP).
History of the Internet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
History of the World Wide Web:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
- Relational algebra, databases, Linked Data (RDF,).
Relational algebra:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra
Relational database:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database
Linked Data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data
RDF:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
- CRISPR/Cas9, CRISPR/Cpf1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
Cas9:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9
CRISPR/Cpf1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR/Cpf1
- Tissue Nanotransfection
- Time, Calendars
Time > History of the calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time#History_of_the_calendar
- Standard units of measure (QUDT URIs)
How about Tesla?!
Nikola Tesla > AC (alternating current) and the induction motor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#AC_and_the_induct...
Induction motor:
Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? (2017)
Was just Googling around for whether Excel (sans VBA scripting of course) is Turing-complete, in order to decide whether telling a layperson that Excel (or spreadsheeting in general) can be considered very much like programming. Came across this 2009 HN thread, "Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?" from pg:
> One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477
What significant advances -- in Excel/spreadsheets, not the Turing-complete thing -- have been made in the 8 years since? What's the YC startup from that cycle that "is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet", and what is it doing today? I remember Grid [0], but that was from 2012. Any other companies make innovations that would overturn the spreadsheet paradigm, or at least be copied by Excel/OO/GSheets?
A commenter mentioned "Queries", since many spreadsheet users use spreadsheets like a database. I just recently noticed that GSheets has a QUERY function [1] that uses "principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) to do searches). The function has been around since 2015 (according to Internet Archive [2]) so perhaps I ignored it because its description then was simply, "Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data."
It appears that "Visualization API Query Language" has a lot of SQL-type features with the immediately obvious exception of joins [3].
edit: Multiple people said they would like Excel to have online functionality, i.e. like Google Sheets, but being able to accept VBA and any other features of legacy Excel spreadsheets. There's now Excel Online but I haven't used it (still sticking to Office 2011 for Mac if I ever need to use Excel instead of GS). How seamless is the transition from offline, legacy Excel files to online Excel?
[0] http://blog.ycombinator.com/grid-yc-s12-reinvents-the-spreadsheet-for-the/
[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20150319144449/https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
[3] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage
Topological sort on cells based on formula references.
Excel sheets are often highly convoluted in cell cross-references in formulas. It would help to have a clean-up mechanism that performs a topological sort on all the cells with formulas and puts them in a more natural order. It would help to be able to identify the backward references even if the cells are not automatically rearranged.
+1 for Topological sort of formulas (e.g. into a Jupyter notebook; as e.g. Python)
https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/2arevn/how_to_u...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1739oc/imp...
[deleted]
The real data structure for financial reporting and analysis is hyperdimensional, like it or not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL
After a 15 year struggle, digital financial reports are a success in the U.S and the Europeans are following up.
---
Also, many people use a spreadsheet when they really want a database. In the office world that would be Access instead of Excel; I like the idea of Access but the implementation is an uncomfortable place of having a complex GUI and having to know some SQL.
---
Finally, decimal arithmetic. Financial calculations should not have the artifacts that come from trying to represent (1/100)th in base 2.
W3C RDF Data Cubes (qb:)
https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineerin...
> RDF Data Cubes vocabulary is an RDF standard vocabulary for expressing linked multi-dimensional statistical data and aggregations.
> Data Cubes have dimensions, attributes, and measures
> Pivot tables and crosstabulations can be expressed with RDF Data Cubes vocabulary
And then SDMX is widely used internationally:
https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/3402#issuecommen...
Linked Data.
> [...] 7 metadata header rows (column label, property URI path, DataType, unit, accuracy, precision, significant figures)
https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibilit...
Specifically, CSVW JSONLD as a lossless output format.
CSVW supports physical units.
https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901990866704900096
> "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web" (#JSONLD, #RDFa HTML) is for Data on the Web #dwbp #linkeddata https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/
> #CSVW defaults to xsd:string if unspecified. "How do you support units of measure?" #qudt https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#units-of-measure
Elon Musk Describes What Great Communication Looks Like
" The world is flat! "*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat
Check out Thomas L. Friedman (@tomfriedman): https://twitter.com/tomfriedman
Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science
List of important publications in computer science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-good-...
Ask HN: How do you, as a developer, set measurable and actionable goals?
I see a lot of people from other industries, say designers or sales people, who can set for themselves actionable and measurable goals such as "Make one illustration a day", "Make a logo a day" or "Sell X units of Y product a day", "Make X ammount of dollars seeling product Z by date X", etc.
How do you, as a developer, set measurable goals for yourself, being it at work or in your side hobbie?
some companies use some kind of agile methodology to manage the work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
two of the most widely used being Scrum and Kanban
which could be used to track how your doing against your self. although recommended not to be used for evaluating employees so take with a grain of salt.
Burn down chart (each story has complexity points; making it possible to estimate velocity and sprint deadlines):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart
User stories in a "story map" (Kanban board) with labels and/or milestones for epics, flights, themes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story#Story_map
Software Development > Requirements Management > Agile Modeling > User Story: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
... Speaking of environmental externalities,
In the US, "Class C" fire extinguishers work on electrical fires:
From Fire_class#Electrical:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Electrical
> Carbon dioxide CO2, NOVEC 1230, FM-200 and dry chemical powder extinguishers such as PKP and even baking soda are especially suited to extinguishing this sort of fire. PKP should be a last resort solution to extinguishing the fire due to its corrosive tendencies. Once electricity is shut off to the equipment involved, it will generally become an ordinary combustible fire.
> In Europe, "electrical fires" are no longer recognized as a separate class of fire as electricity itself cannot burn. The items around the electrical sources may burn. By turning the electrical source off, the fire can be fought by one of the other class of fire extinguishers [citation needed].
How does this compare to carbon-intensive resource extraction operations like gold mining?
(Gold is industrially and medically useful, IIUC)
See also:
"So, clean energy incentives" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070430
Dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain
"Dancing or Fitness Sport? The Effects of Two Training Programs on Hippocampal Plasticity and Balance Abilities in Healthy Seniors"
Front. Hum. Neurosci., 15 June 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00305
Adult neurogenesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_neurogenesis
IIUC:
{Omega 3/6, Cardiovascular exercise,} -> Endocannabinoids -> [Hippocampal,] neurogenesis
"Neurobiological effects of physical exercise" (Hippocampal plasticity, neurogenesis,)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurobiological_effects_of_phy...
"Study: Omega-3 fatty acids fight inflammation via cannabinoids" https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/532158 (Omega 6: Omega 3 ratio)
scholar.google q=cannabinoid+neurogenesis https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cannabinoid+neurogenesi...
Functions of the ECS (Endocannabinoid System):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannabinoid_system#Functio...
- #Role-in-hippocampal-neurogenesis, "runners high"
Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting
This might be a naive question, but I'd like to clear it out.
Do gravitational waves travel at the speed of light?
I know the theory says nothing can travel faster than light. I also know that photons can be seen as quanta or as waves. So my guess is that gravitational waves travel at most, at the speed of light.
But do they? or do they travel slower? faster? Is there a doppler effect for GWs?
I ask because I would think ripples in the space-time fabric itself might be a bit different than light waves or other more studied phenomena.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
These PBS Spacetime episodes should help:
The Speed of Light is NOT About Light - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo
Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfmgyXs7z8
The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlXdsyctD50
Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlXdsyctD50
The Future of Gravitational Waves - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ2RNBAFLj0
Thanks!
"Neutron star": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
New Discovery Simplifies Quantum Physics
OpenAI has developed new baseline tool for improving deep reinforcement learning
https://blog.openai.com/openai-baselines-dqn/ (May 2017)
Deep Learning RL (Reinforcement Learning) algos in this batch of OpenAI RL baselines: DQN, Double Q Learning, Prioritized Replay, Dueling DQN
Src: https://github.com/openai/baselines
[deleted]
https://blog.openai.com/baselines-acktr-a2c/ (August 2017)
ACKTR & A2C (~=A3C)
(The GitHub readme lists: A2C, ACKTR, DDPG, DQN, PPO, TRPO)
... openai/baselines/commits/master: https://github.com/openai/baselines/commits/master
The prior can generally only be understood in the context of the likelihood
Bayes assumes/requires conditional independence of observations; which is sometimes the case.
For example:
- Are the positions of the Earth and the Moon conditionally independent? No.
- In the phrase "the dog and the cat", are "and" and "the" independent? No.
- In a biological system, are we to assume conditional independence? We should not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence
...
"Efficient test for nonlinear dependence of two continuous variables" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4539721/
- In no particular sequence: CANOVA, ANOVA, Pearson, Spearman, Kendall, MIC, Hoeffding
From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-inductive/ :
> It is now generally held that the core idea of Bayesian logicism is fatally flawed—that syntactic logical structure cannot be the sole determiner of the degree to which premises inductively support conclusions. A crucial facet of the problem faced by Bayesian logicism involves how the logic is supposed to apply to scientific contexts where the conclusion sentence is some hypothesis or theory, and the premises are evidence claims. The difficulty is that in any probabilistic logic that satisfies the usual axioms for probabilities, the inductive support for a hypothesis must depend in part on its prior probability. This prior probability represents how plausible the hypothesis is supposed to be based on considerations other than the observational and experimental evidence (e.g., perhaps due to relevant plausibility arguments). A Bayesian logicist must tell us how to assign values to these pre-evidential prior probabilities of hypotheses, for each of the hypotheses or theories under consideration. Furthermore, this kind of Bayesian logicist must determine these prior probability values in a way that relies only on the syntactic logical structure of these hypotheses, perhaps based on some measure of their syntactic simplicities. There are severe technical problems with getting this idea to work. Moreover, various kinds of examples seem to show that such an approach must assign intuitively quite unreasonable prior probabilities to hypotheses in specific cases (see the footnote cited near the end of section 3.2 for details). Furthermore, for this idea to apply to the evidential support of real scientific theories, scientists would have to formalize theories in a way that makes their relevant syntactic structures apparent, and then evaluate theories solely on that syntactic basis (together with their syntactic relationships to evidence statements). Are we to evaluate alternative theories of gravitation (and alternative quantum theories) this way?
>"This prior probability represents how plausible the hypothesis is supposed to be based on considerations other than the observational and experimental evidence (e.g., perhaps due to relevant plausibility arguments)."
I guess I don't know about how "Bayesian logicism" differs from "Bayesian probability", but this is totally false in the latter case. The prior is just supposed to be independent of the current data (eg devised before it was collected). In practice info almost always leaks into the prior + model via tinkering. That is why a priori predictions are so important to proving you are onto something.
Bayesian logicism is the logic derived from Bayesian probability.
Magic numbers are an anti-pattern: which constants are what and why should be justified OR it should be shown that a non-expert-biased form converges regardless.
The use of the term prior probability in that paragraph is not consistent with its use in bayesian probability, so something is wrong.
Also, I am not sure what magic numbers you are referring to.
Ask HN: How to find/compare trading algorithms with Quantopian?
I found this, which links to a number of quantitative trading algorithms that significantly outperform as compared with SPY (an S&P 500 ETF):
"Community Algorithms Migrated to Quantopian 2"
https://www.quantopian.com/posts/community-algorithms-migrat...
Why even build a business, create jobs, and solve the world's problems?
... "Impact investing"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
"Is this a good way to invest in solving for the #GlobalGoals for Sustainable Development ( https://GlobalGoals.org )?"
Ask HN: How do IPOs and ICOs help a business raise capital?
Ask HN: How do IPOs and ICOs help a business raise capital?
IPO: "Initial Public Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering
ICO: "Initial Coin Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
"""
IPO: "Initial Public Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering
ICO: "Initial Coin Offering"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
"""
Solar Window coatings “outperform rooftop solar by 50-fold”
MS: Bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as 1M US homes
So, clean energy incentives.
> That means 1.2% of the Sahara desert is sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world in solar energy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power...
Nearly all other animals on the planet survive entirely on solar energy.
Ask HN: What are your favorite entrepreneurship resources
Hey everyone, I'm teaching an undergraduate class in the fall at a local university here in Miami (FIU) and would love your recommendations on what books or articles or frameworks you think the students should read. My goal for the class is to teach them how to identify problems and prototype solutions for those problems. Hopefully, they make some money from them to help pay for books, etc.
I put these notes together:
Entrepreneurship: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/entrepreneurship
- #plan-for-failure
- #plan-for-success
Investing > Capitalization Table: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/investing#capitaliza...
- I'll add something about Initial Coin Offerings (which are now legal in at least Delaware).
AngelList ( https://angel.co for VC jobs and funding ) asks "What's the most useful business-related book you've ever read?" ... Getting Things Done (David Allen), 43Folders = 12 months + 31 days (Merlin Mann), The Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki), The Personal MBA (Josh Kaufman)
Lever ( https://www.lever.co ) makes recruiting and hiring (some parts of HR) really easy.
LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com ) also has a large selection of qualified talent: https://smallbusiness.linkedin.com/hiring
... How much can you tell about a candidate from what they decide to write on themselves on the internet?
USA Small Business Administration: "10 steps to start your business." https://www.sba.gov/starting-business/how-start-business/10-...
"Startup Incorporation Checklist: How to bootstrap a Delaware C-corp (or S-corp) with employee(s) in California" https://github.com/leonar15/startup-checklist
Jupyter Notebook (was: IPython Notebook) notebooks are diff'able and executable. Spreadsheets can be hard to review. https://github.com/jupyter/notebook
It's now installable with one conda command: ``conda install -y notebook pandas qgrid``
CPU Utilization is Wrong
Instructions per cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle
What does IPC tell me about where my code could/should be async so that it's not stalled waiting for IO? Is combined IO rate a useful metric for this?
There's an interesting "Cost per GFLOPs" table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
Btw these are great, thanks: http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
( I still couldn't fill this out if I tried: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-08-23/linux-perf-tools... )
It's not that your code should be async, but that it should be more cache-friendly. It's probably mostly stalled waiting for RAM.
Ask HN: Can I use convolutional neural networks to clasify videos on a CPU
Is there any way that I can use conv nets to classify videos on a CPU. I do not have GPUs but I want to classify videos.
There's a table with runtime comparisons for a convnet here: https://github.com/ryanjay0/miles-deep/ (GPU CuDNN: 15s, GPU: 19s, CPU: 159s)
(Also written w/ Caffe: https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw)
Esoteric programming paradigms
Re: "Dependent Types"
In Python, PyContracts supports runtime type-checking and value constraints/assertions (as @contract decorators, annotations, and docstrings).
https://andreacensi.github.io/contracts/
Unfortunately, there's yet no unifying syntax between PyContracts and the newer python type annotations which MyPy checks at compile-type.
https://github.com/python/typeshed
What does it mean for types to be "a first class member of" a programming language?
Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles
So, schema.org, has classes (C:) -- subclasses of CreativeWork and Article -- for property (P:) domains (D:) and ranges (R:) which cover this domain:
- CreativeWork: http://schema.org/CreativeWork
- - BlogPosting: http://schema.org/BlogPosting
- - Article: http://schema.org/Article
- - - NewsArticle: http://schema.org/NewsArticle
- - - Report: http://schema.org/Report
- - - ScholarlyArticle: http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle
- - - SocialMediaPosting: http://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting
- - - TechArticle: http://schema.org/TechArticle
Thing: (name, [url], [identifier], [#about], [description[_gh_markdown_html]])
- C: CreativeWork:
- - P: comment R: Comment
- - C: Comment: https://schema.org/Comment
Fact Check now available in Google Search and News
So, publishers can voluntarily add https://schema.org/ClaimReview markup as RDFa, JSON-LD, or Microdata.
Ask HN: Is anyone working on CRISPR for happiness?
"studies have found that genetic influences usually account for 35-50% of the variance in happiness measures"
No doubt there are many reasons why this is extremely complicated
Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2017
Nice.
- https://github.com/fkling/JSNetworkX would be a cool way to build interactive schema:Thing/CreativeWork curriculum graph visualizations (and BFS/DFS traversal)
- #WebSec: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web-development#websec
- Web Development Checklist: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web-development#web-develo...
-- http://webdevchecklist.com/
- | Web Frameworks (GitHub Sphinx wiki (./Makefile)): https://westurner.org/wiki/webframeworks (| Wikipedia, | Homepage, Source, Docs,)
Ask HN: How do you keep track/save your learnings?(so that you can revisit them)
- Vim Voom: `:Voom rest` , ':Voom markdown`
- Jupyter notebooks
- Sphinx docs: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/research#research-tools src: https://github.com/wrdrd/docs/blob/master/docs/consulting/re...
- Sphinx wiki (./Makefile):
-- Src: https://github.com/westurner/wiki
-- Src: https://github.com/westurner/wiki/wiki
-- Web: https://westurner.org/wiki/workflow
interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!
Use a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki or Mnemosyne or one of the others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flashcard_software) and use it on a regular basis, preferably every day.
[deleted]
Ask HN: Criticisms of Bayesian statistics?
In tech circles, it seems that Bayesian statistics is often favored over classical frequentist statistics. In my study of both Bayesian and frequentist statistics, it seems that the results of a Bayesian analysis are generally more intuitive, such as when comparing Bayesian credible intervals to frequentist confidence intervals. It also seems like Bayesian analysis avoids what I think is one of the most serious problems in analysis, the multiple comparisons problem. It's been easy for me to find any number of Bayesian critiques of frequentist stats, but I have rarely seen frequentist defenses against Bayesian stats. This may simply be because I mostly read technology related sites as opposed to more general statistics oriented sites. As such, I would really appreciate hearing some frequentist critiques of Bayesian stats. I feel like the situation can't be as cut and dry as one being better than the other in all things, so I would like to acquire a more balanced perspective by hearing about the other side. Thanks!
~bayesian logicism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-inductive/ :
> It is now generally held that the core idea of Bayesian logicism is fatally flawed—that syntactic logical structure cannot be the sole determiner of the degree to which premises inductively support conclusions. [...]
80,000 Hours career plan worksheet
> What are your best medium-term options (3-15 years)?
> 1. What global problems do you think are most pressing?
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets w/ statistical indicators, AKA GlobalGoals, are for the whole world through 2030.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
"Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141 could make it easy to connect our local, regional, national, and global goals; and find people with similar objectives and solutions.
World's first smartphone with a molecular sensor is coming in 2017
> Looking at the back of the phone, you'd be forgiven for thinking the sensor is just the phone's camera. But that odd-looking dual lens is the scanner, basically the embedded version of the SCiO. It uses spectrometry to shine near-infrared light on objects — fruit, liquids, medicine, even your body — to analyze them.
> Say you're at at the supermarket and you want to check how fresh the tomatoes are. Instead of squeezing them, you'd just launch the SCiO app, hold the scanner up to the skin of the tomato, and it will tell you how fresh it is on a visual scale. Do the same thing to your body and you can check your body mass index (BMI). You need to specify the thing you're scanning at the outset, and the actually analysis is performed in the cloud, but the whole process is a matter of seconds, not minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy
... Tricorder X PRIZE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder_X_Prize
Ask HN: How would one build a business that only develops free software?
So I was reading Richard Stallman's blog on why you should not use google/uber/apple/twitter etc and I understand his reasoning. But what I don't understand is how would one go about building a startup or business that develops and distributes free software only and make good money doing so?
For example, would it be possible to build a free software version of uber/twitter/facebook etc? How would that work?
By removing all restrictions on the software, what is the incentive to not pirate the software? The GPL can be enforced, but that is clearly not practical especially outside the US.
A business is more than just the source code. The source for Reddit, for example, is OSS. So anybody should be able to put Reddit out of business in a few days, right? But yet... nobody has. Hmmm....
So yeah, you can distribute source code and still make money. Lots of companies do it. Red Hat, SugarCRM, Alfresco, etc.
In some ways it's probably even easier for an online service to both be OSS and be successful, exactly because it takes all the other "stuff" (hosting, devops, marketing, network effects, etc.) to be successful. And, in fact, there are OSS replacements for things like Facebook and Twitter. The problem is, very few people use them for whatever reason (probably mostly network effects).
So at least in regards to the Facebooks, Twitters, etc. of the world, the first question you'd have to answer, is how to get people to switch to your service, whether it's free software or otherwise.
> The source for Reddit [...]
Src: https://github.com/reddit/reddit /blob/master/r2/setup.py
Docs: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/Install-guide
"Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES)" is donationware: https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite
"List of Independent GNU social Instances" http://skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_GNU_social_...
> [...] the first question you'd have to answer, is how to get people to switch to your service, whether it's free software or otherwise.
"Growth hacking": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking
"Business models for open-source software" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...
...
- https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes (Apache 2.0)
- https://github.com/apple (Swift is Apache 2.0)
- https://github.com/microsoft
- https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement
...
- "GNU Social" (GNU AGPL v3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social
... http://choosealicense.com/appendix/ has a table for comparison of open source software licenses.
http://tinyurl.com/p6mka3k describes Open Source Governance in a chart with two axes (Cathedral / Bazaar , Benevolent Dictator / Formal Meritocracy) ... as distinct from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance , which is the application of open source software principles to government. USDS Playbook advises "Default to open" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play13
Anarchy / Budgeting: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/budgetdata
Ask HN: If your job involves continually importing CSVs, what industry is it?
I was wondering if people still use CSVs for data exchange now, or if we've mostly moved to JSON and XML.
Arguing for the CSVW (CSV on the Web) W3C Standards:
- "CSV on the Web: A Primer" http://w3c.github.io/csvw/primer/
- Src: https://github.com/w3c/csvw
- Columns have URIs (ideally from a shared RDFS/OWL vocabulary)
- Columns have XSD datatype URIs
- CSVW can be represented as RDF, JSON, JSONLD
With CSV, which extra metadata file describes how many rows at the top are for columnar metadata? (I.e. column labels, property URI, XSD datatype URI, units URI, precision, accuracy, significant figures) ... https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibility#csv-...
... CSVW: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/knowledge-engineering#csvw
@prefix csvw: <http: csvw#="" ns="" <a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a href="<a 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</http:>Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?
I'm in my late twenties and I'm having a bit of a tough time dealing with my level of programming skill.
Over the past 3 years, I've released a few apps on iOS: not bad, nothing that would amaze anyone here. The code is generally messy and horrible, rife with race conditions and barely holding together in parts. (Biggest: 30k LOC.) While I'm proud of my work — especially design-wise — I feel most of my time was spent on battling stupid bugs. I haven't gained any specialist knowledge — just bloggable API experience. There's nothing I could write a book about.
Meanwhile, when I compulsively dig through one-man frameworks like YapDatabase, Audiobus, or AudioKit, I am left in awe! They're brimming with specialist knowledge. They're incredibly documented and organized. Major features were added over the course of weeks! People have written books about these frameworks, and they were created by my peers — probably alongside other work. Same with one-man apps like Editorial, Ulysses, or GoodNotes.
I am utterly baffled by how knowledgeable and productive these programmers are. If I'm dealing with a new topic, it can take weeks to get a lay of the land, figure out codebase interactions, consider all the edge cases, etc. etc. But the commits for these frameworks show that the devs basically worked through their problems over mere days — to say nothing of getting the overall architecture right from the start. An object cache layer for SQL? Automatic code gen via YAML? MIDI over Wi-Fi? Audio destuttering? Pff, it took me like a month to add copy/paste to my app!
I'm in need of some recalibration. Am I missing something? Is this quality of work the norm, or are these just exceptional programmers? And even if they are, how can I get closer to where they're standing? I don't want to wallow in my mediocrity, but the mountain looks almost insurmountable from here! No matter the financial cost or effort, I want to make amazing things that sustain me financially; but I can't do that if it takes me ten times as long to make a polished product as another dev. How do I get good enough to consistently do work worth writing books about?
For identifying strengths and weaknesses: "Programmer Competency Matrix":
- http://sijinjoseph.com/programmer-competency-matrix/
- https://competency-checklist.appspot.com/
- https://github.com/hltbra/programmer-competency-checklist
... from: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/software-development#compu... )
> How do I get good enough to consistently do work worth writing books about?
- These are great reads: "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" http://aosabook.org/en/
- TDD.
[deleted]
Ask HN: Anything Like Carl Sagan's Cosmos for Computer Science?
Is there anything like Carl Sagan's Cosmos that talks about the history of computing in an accessible way? Pondering Christmas gifts for my niece.
Computer #History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
Outline of Computer Engineering #History of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_engineerin...
History of Computer Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science
Outline of Computer Science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_computer_science
History of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
History of the World Wide Web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
... maybe a bit OT; but, interestingly, IDK if any of these include a history section:
#K12CSFramework (Practices, Concepts): https://k12cs.org
- "Impacts of Computing" (Culture; Social Interactions; Safety, Law, and Ethics): https://k12cs.org/framework-statements-by-progression/#jump-...
"Competencies and Tasks on the Path to Human-Level AI" (Perception, Actuation, Memory, Learning, Reasoning, Planning, Attention, Motivation, Emotion, Modeling Self and Other, Social Interaction, Communication, Quantitative, Building/Creation): http://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview#Competencies_and...
Code.org (#HourOfCode): https://code.org/learn
Not really in keeping with the idea of a gift suitable for a niece.
No, but particulary more comprehensive and informative than any one video. These links (to #OER) would be useful for anyone intending to try and replicate the form and style of the "Cosmos" video series with Computer Science content.
Cosmos was also a dead tree book. [1] It was not uncommonly given as a gift.
The original TV series was broadcast the same year as its publication, 1980, but I don't think it was readily available on consumer tape until several years later and then not at normal holiday gift prices. Back in those days, most video libraries were built by the librarian directly recording broadcasts. But most people would just wait for a rebroadcast.
Learn X in Y minutes
this has been shared/posted a hundred times before... nothing new here.
Eh, I can't honestly tell if there has been more X's added since the last time it was posted and I don't feel like putting in the time into the wayback machine to find out.
The source is hosted on GitHub; there's a commit log (for each file and directory): https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs/commits/ma...
Org mode 9.0 released
I love Org mostly for its ability to link to stuff. In my mind it's the big feature that sets it apart from using, say, a separate application to do my task management. For instance:
- When I'm reading email (in emacs), I can quickly create a TODO that links back to the current email I'm reading (most of my TODOs, in fact, link to an email, so this is very useful),
- For my org file where I keep notes about the servers I'm running, I might link to a specific line on a remote apache config,
- For a bug report I might link to a specific git commit in a project to look at later
Any TODO that is important gets scheduled, so that it is linked to from the agenda view. In this way it's very hard for me to lose track of anything, despite most of my work communication happening through email. In fact I now prefer email over using something like Basecamp, because org makes it easier for me to manage!
Because Emacs is an OS the way it should be — an extensible system with a unified UI instead of a pile of separate and hardly interoperable applications.
"b-but the UNIX philosophy!"
The more time I spend with UNIX and hear the "UNIX philosophy" used in place of argument when someone doesn't like the feature set of some software, the more I realize that we need to move on from UNIX. We should take more ideas from things like Emacs and the Lisp machines when designing our software, and less from UNIX.
Emacs has very few self-contained mega packages; in its own way, Emacs software is built by chaining together smaller packages. Many packages are little more than extensions to other packages.
But their interop is better. Besides Emacs packages having much greater "contact surface" (packages can augment other packages, if needed), the biggest problem with UNIX philosophy is using unstructured text as exchange medium. It leads to huge waste and proliferation of bugs, as each tool or script you use has to have its own custom (and bug-ridden) parser, and outputs its own unstructured and usually undocumented data format. This is one of those moments the history of computing took a huge step backwards. All that recent push for passing JSON around instead of plaintext? That's just rediscovering what we've lost when UNIX came along.
Filenames may contain newlines. JSON strings may contain newlines.
The modular aspects of the UNIX philosophy are pretty cool; the data interchange format (un-typed \n-delimited strings) is irrational (and
dangerous).
JSON w/ a JSONLD @context and XSD type URIs may also contain newlines (which should be escaped)
Note that, with OSX bash, tab \t must be specified as $'\t'.
And, sometimes, it's \r\n instead of just \n (which is extra-format metadata).
And then Unicode. Oh yeah, unicodë.
You don't have to use $'', you can also use literal tabs (ctrl-v to insert literals). The main difference between macOS and Linux that people notice is that macOS sed doesn't itself interpret \t (so you have to use literal tabs or $'' there).
\r\n is Windows, not Unix.
What about Unicode? (Btw, UTF-8 was created by unixers Rob Pike and Ken Thompson https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt )
Ask HN: Best Git workflow for small teams
I have been building up a small team of programmers that are coming from CVS. I am looking for some ideas on ideal workflows.
What do you currently use for teams of 5-10 people?
We've been using the Github flow (or some variation of it) in teams of 2-10 people for a few years now. We work on feature branches, merge after code review using the github web UI. Here's a few things that help us:
- Make a rule that anything that's in master can be deployed by anyone at any time. This will enforce discipline for code review, but also for introducing changes that f.e. require migrations. You'll use feature flags more, split db schema changes into several deployments, make code work with both schema version, etc. All good practices that you'll need anyway when you reach larger scale and run into issues with different versions of code running concurrently during deployments.
- If you're using Github, check out the recently added options for controlling merging. Enable branch protection for master, so that only pull request that are green on CI and have been reviewed can be merged. Enable different dropdown options for the merge button (eg rebase and merge), these are useful for small changes.
- It takes some time to get used to those constraints. Make sure that everyone is on board, and do a regular review of the workflow just as you would review your code. It takes some time to get used to, but I think it's worth it in the long run.
+1 for HubFlow (GitFlow > HubFlow).
- https://westurner.org/tools/#hubflow
- Src: https://github.com/datasift/gitflow
- Docs: https://datasift.github.io/gitflow/
-- The git branch diagrams (originally from GitFlow) are extremely helpful: https://datasift.github.io/gitflow/IntroducingGitFlow.html
TDD Doesn't Work
tl;dr = someone did a study that used a methodology that confirmed that working in small chunks and writing tests as you go is good, but that it's not very important if you write the tests before the small chunk of code or after the small chunk of code.
Aren't tests supposed to be a tool to help design API? in that perspective a test should be written first. The problem IMHO is the choice of methodology as there is several kind of tests. Some may be more time consuming when it comes to the set up.
Personally, I think unit tests shine best when you're designing an API. I can swing from hate to love and back about TDD in minutes, but when it comes to thinking about how your code will be used, unit tests (did we stop using that term?) are a tremendously useful tool I have.
I guess if all code written could be seen as an API, TDD would be great, but that's not the world I live in.
> I guess if all code written could be seen as an API, TDD would be great, but that's not the world I live in.
If not an "Application Programming Interface", isn't all code an Interface? There's input and there's output.
With Object Oriented programming, that there is an interface is more explicit (even if all you're doing is implementing objects that are already tested). There are function call argument (type) specifications (interfaces) whether it's functional or OO.
I thought that TDD morphed into ending up with a regression/integration/conformation test suite instead of using tests as specifications written prior to writing products. And even 100,000s of tests won't help you in very advanced applications like cloud/cluster infrastructure as sometimes it's simply too difficult if not impossible to come up with tests (imagine observer effect when your cluster deadlock happens only in certain rare nanosecond windows and adding a testing framework will make you miss those windows and the problem never happens) and people with mental capacity capable of writing them (e.g. Google/FB-level) are better utilized in writing the product itself.
How do the people who write them know that they work?
TDD presents a paradox that requires split-brain thinking: when writing a test, you pretend to forget what branch of code you are introducing, and when writing a branch, you pretend to forget you already knew the solution. It is annoying as hell.
You CAN indeed cover all your branches with tests afterwards. You can even give that a fancier name, like "Exploratory Testing". Of course it may be more boring or tedious, but is a perfectly valid way to ensure coverage when needed.
TDD was great for popularizing writing test first; However I much prefer the methodology called CABWT - Cover All Branches With Tests. Let the devs choose the way to do it, because not everyone likes these pretend games.
TDD requires you to write FUNCTIONAL test first, not unit tests you are talking about.
I was commenting on the methodology as I heard and watched it explained by the author (Robert C Martin), as well as the way it was presented in his videos.
TDD workflow is fine; it's not thinking about the pink elephant (the source code) idea that bugs me.
Robert Martin is author of Agile manifesto.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Kent-Beck-refer-to-the-redisc...
The original description of TDD was in an ancient book about programming. It said you take the input tape, manually type in the output tape you expect, then program until the actual output tape matches the expected output.
+1. TDD could be considered as a derivation of the Scientific Method (Hypothesis Testing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
Test first isolates out a null hypothesis (that the test already passed); but not that it passes/fails because of some other chance variation (e.g. hash randomization and unordered maps).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
+1 Right on the spot.
TDD requires you to draw your target first, then hit or miss it with the code, like in science: hypotheses -> confirmation/declining via experiments -> working theory.
But in practice, lot of coders are hitting a point instead, then they draw target around that point, like in fake science: we throw coin 100 times, distribution is 60/40, our hypothesis: random coin flip has 60 to 40 ratio, our hypothesis confirmed by experiment, huge savings, hooray!
C for Python programmers (2011)
LearnXinYminutes tuts are pretty cool. I learned C++ before I learned Python (CPython ~2.0) before I learned C:
C++ ("c w/ classes", i thought to myself):
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C++
- https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c++/
Python 2, 3:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
- https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
- https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python3/
C:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)
- https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c/
And then I learned Java. But before that, I learned (q)BASIC, so
Ask HN: How do you organise/integrate all the information in your life?
Hello fellow HNers,
How do you organise your life/work/side projects/todo lists/etc in an integrated way?
We have:
* To do lists/Reminders
* Bookmark lists
* Kanban boards
* Wikis
* Financial tools
* Calenders/Reminders
* Files on disk
* General notes
* ...
So far, I've found a wiki to be almost the most flexible in keeping all manner of raw information kind of organised, but lacks useful features like reminders, and minimal tagging support, no easy way to keep track of finances, etc.
I understand 'best tool for the job', but there's just so...many...
Emacs.
- Todo lists and reminders. org-agenda.
- Bookmark lists. org-capture and org-protocol.
- Kanban boards. I don't use this, but kanban.el.
- Wiki. Org-mode files and grep/ag with helm.
- Financial tools. ledger.
- Calendar/reminders. Org-agenda.
- Files on disk. dired, org-mode.
- General notes. Org-mode.
- Literate programming. org-babel.
- Mail. mu4e.
- rss. elfeed, gnus, or rss2email.
- git. magit.
- irc. erc.
- ...Org-Mode is the one thing that makes me want to move from vim to emacs.. but I just don't feel like investing the time in getting proficient with emacs at this stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode#Integration lists a number of Vim extensions with OrgMode support.
... "What is the best way to avoid getting "Emacs Pinky"?" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/52492/what-is-the-best-wa...
They are all pale imitations of what org-mode offers.
[deleted]
Ask HN: What are the best web tools to build basic web apps as of October 2016?
Questions:
1: Which technologies are popular and what do people like about them? (To help someone deciding between). Seems like React frontend, or perhaps Vue? and Node being the popular backend?
2: Is there a site that keeps track of the various options for frontend and backend frameworks and how their popularity progresses?
1. I work with Django, Django Rest Framework, React, works well. I heard that Vue might be an interesting option. Honestly there's a myriad of tools/framework around there, you have to ask yourself what are you trying to achieve? Is it a one shot app you'll build over the week end? Something that you'd like to maintain over time? That may scale? Are you working alone on this or not? Is it an exercise to learn a new stack? I started a startup 4 years ago, asked a friend who's a ruby/rails dev for advice about tech/stack, his answer, yes rails is awesome but as you already know python go for Django as my goal was primarily to get stuff done business-wise not so much to learn cool new tech. So be aware of your options and definitely spend some time to know them but in the end they're just tools, don't forget why you use them in the first place.
2. I stumbled upon http://stackshare.io the other day, I can't vouch for it but seemed nice to have a quick overview of what languages / framework / services are used around.
+1 for http://stackshare.io/
* Backend performance: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
* Frontend examples: https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc
There are tradeoffs between: performance, development speed, trainability (documentation), depth and breadth of developer community, long-term viability (foundation, backers), maintenance (upgrade path), API flexibility (decoupling, cohesion), standards compliance, vulnerability/risk (breadth), out of the box usability, accessibility, ...
So, for example, there are WYSIWYG tools which get like the first 70-80% of the serverside and clientside requirements; and then there's a learning curve (how to do the rest of the app as abstractly as the framework developers). ( If said WYSIWYG tools aren't "round-trip" capable, once you've customized any of the actual code, you have to copy paste (e.g. from a diff) in order to preserve your custom changes and keep using the GUI development tool. )
... Case in point: Django admin covers very many use cases (and is already testable, tested), but often we don't think to look at the source of the admin scaffolding app until we've written one-off models, views, and templates.
- Django Class-based Views abstract alot of the work into already-tested components.
- Django REST Framework has OpenAPI (swagger) and a number of 3rd party authentication and authorization integrations available.
- In a frontend framework (MVVM), ARIA (Accessibility standards), the REST adapter and error handling are important (in addition to the aforementioned criteria (long-term viability, upgrade path)) ... and then we want to do realtime updates (with something like COMET, WebSockets, WebRTC)
Similar features in any framework are important for minimizing re-work. "Are there already tests for a majority of these components?"
Harvard and M.I.T. Are Sued Over Lack of Closed Captions
I'm really surprised to see this anti-accesibility sentiment on HN, where you see comments about contrast/scroll hijacking/Javascript requirability and numerous other things the WCAG recommends against on nearly every link posted. You'd expect Harvard and M.I.T. to have wheelchair ramps so disabled students could get to class right? It shouldn't be so controversial that their lectures should be accessible as well. Maybe some are concerned over the possible costs but there are solutions to that such as crowdsourcing. Universities are meant to spread knowledge for all and even if they're a public good, they should still be held accountable for it.
Why should lectures given away to the public for free obligate the university to make them accessible? We aren't talking about enrolled students here. If we were, that would likely not even be an argument. But placing an obligation on a university to provide as much accessibility as they would for their students to the masses of the internet as a condition of freely sharing with the world? That's not the same thing. There's nuance here, and people are missing it.
Why is everyone getting so caught up in the free part? If the lectures were a dollar would you say that they're obligated to subtitle them then? Nope, then you'd say that they're forcing a private organization to do things. (Or do you have a specific cost threshold before you expect subtitles? Hint: deaf people don't.) It's great that they're releasing them for free, very altruistic, but they're also depriving disabled people of them which the ADA specifically requires. Besides, they could easily provide a mechanism for crowd-sourcing subtitles which I noted in another comment so the cost wouldn't really be as burdensome as people want to think. Also, are people forgetting that these are Harvard and MIT? The NAD isn't going to be suing your mom and pop website. Harvard and MIT can afford it and should be held to higher standards. I hate to use the word due to the anti-SJW frenzy the internet is in these days, but the ableism in this thread is appalling. No one is trying to see from the side of the NAD, with one user even suggesting that it just wants to line its coffers...
> Why is everyone getting so caught up in the free part?
To restate my final point: there is nuance here, and people are missing it. I'm commenting for the purpose of interrogating the nuance, because I feel somewhat mixed on the issue. For online course material that is offered to enrolled students and required for the completion of a degree, I do not believe anyone is arguing in opposition. However, the collection and publishing of course material provided to enrolled students, then sharing it for free to non-enrolled students is a different matter entirely. The free part is an important detail in this particular matter and its circumstances, and shouldn't be wholly ignored, or treated as if it isn't part of the equation.
> If the lectures were a dollar would you say that they're obligated to subtitle them then?
Possibly. Most likely, only if paying for the material and following the courses was somehow tied to earning enrolled status and credit toward a degree, though. Because at that point, someone is actually a student looking to obtain something in exchange for studying the material, the university is engaged in the activity for which it receives federal funding, and we would rightly expect the institution to treat them as students according to the law and all its glorious regulations that seek to provide all students with a level playing field. Giving the material to the public at large with no fees or strings attached--meaning no strings attached to either party--isn't something I think we should discourage.
> Or do you have a specific cost threshold before you expect subtitles?
There is no cost threshold on my mind, no. There is only the threshold of whether the parties consuming the materials are enrolled students seeking a degree at the institution.
> ... but they're also depriving disabled people of them ...
I'm not convinced this is true. The internet is full of freely available information from a variety of sources, much of it in video and audio form, and we do not have a longstanding debate centering on how much of the freely available information in video and audio form is depriving the hearing impaired of that information and should be made accessible. What's happening here is singling out a particularly easy target and asserting that they should be held to a different standard than all the other parties producing free, inaccessible content, and calling it "depriving disabled people" of the content. This stirs my something-isn't-quite-right detector, because we are attempting to provide a very narrowly scoped requirement onto a narrowly scoped party, on the basis of taking rules that inarguably apply to their services in one particular set of conditions, and applying them to another, quite different set of conditions.
> Also, are people forgetting that these are Harvard and MIT? The NAD isn't going to be suing your mom and pop website. Harvard and MIT can afford it and should be held to higher standards.
This is an argument from a pretty low set of standards, honestly. The ability of the party to afford increased accessibility sets up a rather disingenuous cash-gate on the issue, and completely debases the argument for accessibility into an argument about money. We're either concerned about establishing a proper set of guidelines and cultural expectations for making information accessible, regardless of its cost, or we're targeting entities with cash who are otherwise doing something we applaud, and saying because they have the means to do more, they should do more, and bringing the force of the state against them to compel them to do so. This is the kind of thinking that inexorably leads to crafting laws that target specific parties, leave open loopholes for other parties, and wind up subverting our intended goals by allowing those who wish to avoid a particular set of regulations and obligations by reorganizing under an uncovered entity type. We'd surely want to avoid such an outcome--even if it would help us better identify truly bad actors.
> I hate to use the word due to the anti-SJW frenzy the internet is in these days, but the ableism in this thread is appalling. No one is trying to see from the side of the NAD, with one user even suggesting that it just wants to line its coffers...
I don't think there is an appalling level of ableism in this thread. I am, and I think others are, trying to interrogate the issue from multiple perspectives, but we are coming to different conclusions (or are withholding conclusions) than you seem to expect. Perhaps that's because we're looking at the nuances of the circumstances.
From the NAD's perspective, I'm questioning and considering the affordances one ought to expect from information being made freely available in its original form, and what limitations can sensibly be agreed to exist--because it is insensible to expect there to be no limitations. This includes interrogating the alleged principles involved, and to what extent and to which parties they apply. When they don't apply equally to all parties, especially when they don't apply equally on the basis of one's ability to pay, I find the alleged principles reveal themselves to be suspect. This perspective, in particular, is the one in which the absence of affordances and obligations on information-releasing parties are felt most acutely. My lacking of a particular ability preventing me from equally enjoying informative and enlightening material is a bitter pill--especially if I can reasonably expect otherwise.
From the university and academia perspective, I am questioning and considering what reasonable thresholds one ought to be able to easily identify when releasing information in is original form freely to the public, or withholding it because additional accessibility affordances cannot reasonably be provided in light of the return on the time invested versus simply releasing the information. This perspective, in particular, is the one in which the force and burden of the obligations we levy as a society are felt most acutely. For instance, if a professor is teaching a course in which no persons enrolled have a disability, is the professor obligated to only use information which is accessible to serve the unknown contingent of internet consumers should the university decide to release the course materials freely on the internet? Are the lines only drawn at choosing videos with accurate captions? What about all the millions of people with other learning disabilities of some sort--what is the university obligated to do to ensure they are not "depriving disabled people" of this information? If other kinds of learning disabilities do not merit such affordances, why not? Why only this one or that one?
From the social and cultural perspective, I am questioning and considering what expectations and obligations we ought to hold in such cases for both parties, and how we should reasonably define these expectations for accessibility to as many people as possible and the obligations of implementation. Do we base our expectations and obligational determination on defining thresholds of sheer number of people who may potentially be affected by the lack of affordances? Do we only care about certain accessibility affordances, while ignoring others? Why or why not? We have, I think, passed the point of solving many of society's issues with hammers and saws. We now need scalpels. Much as medical science drastically improves outcomes by isolating bad things and eradicating them with precision, instead of simply removing a whole appendage, we need to pay attention to the nuances and rationally interrogate them to figure out what we think is best socially and culturally. If that's increasing the reach of federal disability law to cover information that is given away for free for the masses of internet consumers, okay. But we better establish some bulletproof and sane principles for doing so, and hold all information producers equally accountable. If we don't, then let's drop the veneer that we are holding all individual and organizational entities equally responsible and accountable, and admit we are instead targeting specific entities based on their perceived ability to pay for the increased obligation to be universally accessible.
Aside from feeling mixed in sum of all the above perspectives and not jumping to immediate and simplistic conclusions that ignore the nuances of circumstance, I continue to feel mixed because I think, as a principle, an accessible web is a better web. I hold firm to the principle that the more information people have access to, the better off they are, and the better a society is for providing this information as accessibly as possible to as many people as possible. However, I think there is also a somewhat disappointing need to include in our rational calculations when information producers, whomever they may be, are publishing that information as they have it, to put it out there, to share it widely with as many people as they can in the form it exists. Perhaps if we had better tools, we could abstract away the burden, then try taking the route of expecting entities to use certain technologies that alleviate the need to take on making things accessible on their own. If we make accessibility a social and cultural good and goal, how might that change how we produce information?
When a student is paying for an education in a federally-funded institution, it's reasonable to expect video-captioning, braille, text-scalable HTML (not PDF) wherever feasible. What about Sign Language interpretation? Simple English?
It would be great if everyone could afford to offer accessible content.
Maybe, instead of paying instructors, all lectures should be typed verbarim - in advance - and delivered by Text-to-Speech software (with gestural scripting and intonation). All in the same voice.
- Ahead-of-time lecture scripts could be used to help improve automated speech recognition accuracy.
- Provide additional support for paid captioning
-- Tools
-- Labor
- Provide support for crowdsourced captioning services
-- Feature: Upvote to prioritize
-- Feature: Flag as garbled
- Develop video-platform-agnostic transcription software (and make it available for free)
-- Desktop offline Speech-to-Text
-- Mobile offline Speech-to-Text
-- Speaker-specific language model training
- Require use of a video-platform with support for automated transcription
-- YouTube
--
- Companies with research in this space:
-- Speech Recognition, [Automated] Transcription, Autocomplete hinting for [Crowd-sourced] captioning
-- IBM
--- YouTube has automated transcription
--- Google Voice supports transcription corrections, but AFAIU it's not speaker-specific
-- Baidu
-- Nuance (Dragon,)
--
... Textual lecture transcriptions are useful for everyone; because Ctrl-F to search.
- Label (with RDFa structured data) accessible content to make it easy to find
-- Schema.org accessibility structured data (for Places, Events)
--- https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/254
--- http://schema.org/accessibilityFeature
--- http://schema.org/accessibilityPhysicalFeature and/or
--- http://schema.org/amenityFeature
--- https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/254
- Challenges
-- Funding
-- CPU Time
-- Error Rate
-- Mitigating spam and vandalism
-- Human-verified crowdsourced corrections can/could be used to train recognizing and generative speaker-specific models
-- In the film A.I. (2001), there's a scene where they're asking questions of Robin Williams and the intonation/inflection inadvertantly wastes one of their 3 wishes / requests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence
> When a student is paying for an education in a federally-funded institution...
That's not what we are talking about.
Jack Dorsey Is Losing Control of Twitter
Well, one would hope so. Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those "president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook. The stockholders can fire Dorsey when necessary.
The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.
Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.
This is a great comment. For most companies, grinding along and sometimes taking a hit, firing people, slow things down and then pick it up again and grow, is the norm. If every company that stops getting massive growth would stop, we wouldn't have factories mass producing our day to day products, the post office wouldn't be delivering us goods anymore, etc. twitter is a mature organisation. There are jobs. There is cashflow. We should stop letting journalists make a big deal of companies that don't have infinite growth and applaud the entrepreneurs that build the monster.
There is another angle that we often don't consider: who the media writes for. In general, the financial press writes for investors (this is the same for the tech media), and so their alarm bells and dire predictions are for investors, not necessarily about underlying fundamentals or facts of a business for everyone else.
- Are these jounalists working for media companies that are competing for time?
- If they are shareholders, they don't seem to be declaring their conflicts of interest.
- For Twitter to respond would require that Twitter be taking editorial positions regarding the activities of competing media conglomerates. ("You're down, you should all just cash out now" [while you have far more daily active customers and revenue per user than a number of TV channels combined].
- Are there competing international interests and biases? Is the market for noiseless citizen media saturated? How much time is there, really?
I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but I think you're considering Twitter to be a media company, like a newspaper company? If so, I don't think that comparison is accurate so there'd be no conflict of interest really.
The conflict of interest is if the journalists owned shares of Twitter.
The conflict of interest is that one media company is publishing negative articles about another media company amidst acquisition talks.
What is their interest here? How do they intend to affect the perceived value of Twitter? Are there sources cited? Data? Figures?
I'm still a bit confused. Are you implying that Bloomberg and Twitter are in competition? I'm not so sure they are, really, in any sense.
Bloomberg is a private corporation which sells ads and exercises editorial discretion in publishing market-moving information and/or editorials.
Twitter is a public corporation which hosts Tweets, sells ads, and selects trending Twitter Moments.
Both companies are media services. Both companies compete for ad revenue. Both companies compete for readers' time.
(Medium allows journalists to publish information and/or editorials for free (or, now, for subscription revenue from membership programs)).
Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task
Can someone explain to me how this fits into Schema.org's core mission (which, as I understand it, is basically to provide a lightweight ontological overlay on pages to assist search engines)? This seems like an attempt to build a formal project-management ontology for systems that will never get indexed by Google -- an effort that might benefit more from the Basic Formal Ontology as a starting point.
A (search) use cases:
- I want to find an organinization with a project with similar goals and objectives.
- I want to find other objectives linked to indicators.
- I want to say "the schema:Project described in this schema:WebPage is relevant to one or more #GlobalGoals" (so that people searching for ways to help can model similar goal-directed projects)
so basically you make your site easier readable by search engines which in turn extract the data from your site stealing your traffic?
for example if you search for something on google, you get a preview in a box of the main info with a link to the original article (e.g. on wikipedia, imdb etc depending on what you search for), in most cases you no longer need to visit the original link.
There are always two ways to look at things.
In the case of Wikipedia and similar high-traffic websites, it probably takes a bit of the load off. It's probably a considerable saving in terms of serving requests if a user searches for an actor they think they recognise from a movie and see a snippet from Google served from Google's cache rather than a full pageview from Wikipedia.
In the case of physical stores and offices, I would imagine that a check for opening hours or telephone number shouldn't be counted as a pageview -> conversion anyway — they already chose you i.e. converted. Maybe they're a returning customer or somebody who liked the email marketing you sent them.
Is Google Maps stealing traffic from you by showing your business on the map? Maybe, but they're also doing you a favour. Neither Google nor Google Maps are likely to go anywhere anytime soon, and a considerable number of people are only going to check Google Maps and won't bother checking your site for the same information w.r.t. your business's location.
Beneficial in terms of reviews as well — displaying the aggregated score in a rich snippet is arguably preferable to letting the user click through where they can be persuaded against the 4 star average by an impassioned negative review.
Google obviously wants to be the one and only gateway to the web, and they want to keep you on Google pages as much as possible to show as many ads as possible, but unless you're selling ads, counting pageviews/traffic is pointless unless it's new business, and people new to you are unlikely to make a snap judgement based on a rich snippet. If anything, it's more likely to convince the new user to click through to your site.
[IMHO]
> In the case of physical stores and offices, I would imagine that a check for opening hours or telephone number shouldn't be counted as a pageview -> conversion anyway — they already chose you i.e. converted. Maybe they're a returning customer or somebody who liked the email marketing you sent them.
As well, adding structured data to the page (with RDFa, JSONLD, or Microdata) makes it much easier for voice assistant apps to parse out the data people ask for.
> Google [...]
Schema.org started as a collaborative effort between Bing, Google, Yahoo, and then Yandex. Anyone with a parser can read structured data from an HTML page with RDFa or a JSONLD document.
The Open Source Data Science Masters
This seems like a nice compilation for introductory material in one place.
I still can't get over the term "data science", though. Not only is it ridiculously meaningless - what sort of science doesn't involve data, and how often would data be useful to something that isn't scientific at some level - its meaninglessness derives from the hyped buzzword trendiness that drove its upswing.
I say this as someone whose expertise is really sitting at the nexus of what would be considered data science. I feel as if I have been doing what might be considered data science for a long time, before there was a label for it, but watching its ascendance in demand and popularity has been troubling. I should be happy, but I feel like it's being driven by fashion rather than fundamentals, which makes me worried about the trajectory going forward, and disturbed by some communities being thrown under the bus.
>I still can't get over the term "data science", though. Not only is it ridiculously meaningless - what sort of science doesn't involve data, and how often would data be useful to something that isn't scientific at some level - its meaninglessness derives from the hyped buzzword trendiness that drove its upswing.
I couldn't disagree more.
There are a number of terms for domain-independent data analysis:
- data analysis
- statistics
- statistical modeling
- machine learning
- big data
- data journalism
- data science
I think it makes perfect sense that the practice of collecting and analyzing data be qualified and indentified as a specific field.
I know of no better resource than these venn diagrams which identify the 'danger zones' around data science:
- http://datascienceassn.org/content/fourth-bubble-data-scienc...
Is there such a thing as a statistical model which only applies to a certain domain?
Domain knowledge ("substantive expertise"/"social sciences" in the linked venn diagrams) serves only to logically validate statistical models which may be statistically valid but otherwise illogical, in context to currently-available field knowledge (bias).
Regardless of field, the math is the same.
Regardless of field, the model either fits or it doesn't.
Regardless of field, the controls were either sufficient or they weren't.
We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated
So, we should have a structured way to represent that one study reproduces another? (e.g. that, with similar controls, the relation between the independent and dependent variables was sufficiently similar)
- RDF is the best way to do this. RDF can be represented as RDFa (RDF in HTML) and as JSON-LD (JSON LinkedData).
... " #LinkedReproducibility "
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LinkedReproducibility
It isn't/wouldn't be sufficient to, with one triple, say (example.org/studyX, 'reproduces', example.org/studyY); there is a reified relation (an EdgeClass) containing metadata like who asserts that studyX reproduces studyY, when they assert that, and why (similar controls, similar outcome).
Today, we have to compare PDFs of studies and dig through them for links to the actual datasets from which the summary statistics were derived; so specifying who is asserting that studyX reproduces studyY is very relevant.
Ideally, it should be possible to publish a study with structured premises which lead to a conclusion (probably with formats like RDFa and JSON-LD, and a comprehensive schema for logical argumentation which does not yet exist). ("#StructuredPremises")
Most simply, we should be able to say "the study control type URIs match", "the tabular column URIs match", "the samples were representative", and the identified relations were sufficiently within tolerances to say that studyX reproduces studyY.
Doing so in prosaic, parenthetical two-column PDFs is wasteful and shortsighted.
An individual researcher then, builds a set of beliefs about relations between factors in the world from a graph of studies ("#StudyGraph") with various quantitative and qualitative metadata attributes.
As fields, we would then expect our aggregate #StudyGraphs to indicate which relations between dependent and independent variables are relevant to prediction and actionable decision making (e.g. policy, research funding).
The SQL filter clause: selective aggregates
You can do these with Ibis and various SQL engines:
* http://docs.ibis-project.org/sql.html#aggregates-considering...
* https://github.com/cloudera/ibis/tree/master/ibis/sql (PostgreSQL, Presto, Redshift, SQLite, Vertical)
* https://github.com/cloudera/ibis/blob/master/ibis/sql/alchem... (SQLAlchemy)
Ask HN: What do you think about the current education system?
Is it good, bad? What can be done better? What problems do you identify? Is it upsetting? are you used to it?
A Reboot of the Legendary Physics Site ArXiv Could Shape Open Science
Interesting to see their approach and the reasons why they are not building more features on top of ArXiv. Although comments on papers might be a dangerous area to venture into there are definitely places on the web where the ability to annotate and comment papers is helping science move forward. A good example is the Polymath project and Terry Tao's blog. Tao's recent solution to the Erdos discrepancy problem,an 80-year-old number theory problem, was actually triggered by a comment on his blog. Another example is www.fermatslibrary.com. Although the papers in the platform are more historical/foundational, they were able to get consistently good/constructive comments that help people understand papers better.
I've written up a few ideas about PDFs, edges, and reproducibility (in particular); with the Hashtags #LinkedReproducibility (and #MetaResearch)
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LinkedReproducibility
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MetaResearch
- schema.org/MedicalTrialDesign enumerations could/should be extended to all of science (and then added to all of these PDFs without structured edge types like e.g. {intendedToReproduce, seemsToReproduce} (which then have specific ensuing discussions))
- http://health-lifesci.schema.org/MedicalTrialDesign
- there should be a way to evaluate controls in a structured, blinded, meta-analytic way
- PDF is pretty, but does not support RDFa (because this is a graph)
... notes here: https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/data-science#linked-reprod...
(edit) please feel free to implement any of these ideas (e.g. CC0)
Principles of good data analysis
Helpful; thanks!
"Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research" http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
* Rule 1: For Every Result, Keep Track of How It Was Produced
* Rule 2: Avoid Manual Data Manipulation Steps
* Rule 3: Archive the Exact Versions of All External Programs Used
* Rule 4: Version Control All Custom Scripts
* Rule 5: Record All Intermediate Results, When Possible in Standardized Formats
* Rule 6: For Analyses That Include Randomness, Note Underlying Random Seeds
* Rule 7: Always Store Raw Data behind Plots
* Rule 8: Generate Hierarchical Analysis Output, Allowing Layers of Increasing Detail to Be Inspected
* Rule 9: Connect Textual Statements to Underlying Results
* Rule 10: Provide Public Access to Scripts, Runs, and Results
Sandve GK, Nekrutenko A, Taylor J, Hovig E (2013) Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research. PLoS Comput Biol 9(10): e1003285. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003285
This is way more useful than the original post, thanks.
This is great, thank you!
Why Puppet, Chef, Ansible aren't good enough
So, basically, replace yum, apt, etc. with a 'stateless package management system'. That seems to be the gist of the argument. Puppet, Chef and Ansible (he left out Salt and cfengine!) have little to do with the actual post, and are only mentioned briefly in the intro.
They would all still be relevant with this new packaging system.
For some reason, this came to mind: https://xkcd.com/927/
No.
Well, yes, replace yum, apt, etc. But once you have a functional package management system, you don't need Puppet, Chef or Ansible, because the same stateless configuration language can be used to describe cluster configurations as well as packages. So build a provisioning tool based on that, instead.
That provisioning tool is called NixOps. The article links to it, but doesn't really go into detail about NixOps as a replacement for Puppet et al.
am I going to switch distros just to use a different provisioning tool?
Yes... Eventually.
The Nix model is the only sane model going into the future where complexity will continue to increase. Nobody is forcing you to switch distros now, but hinting that you'll probably want to look into this, because the current models might well be on their way to obsolescence.
* Unique PREFIX; cool. Where do I get signed labels and checksums?
* I fail to see how baking configuration into packages can a) reduce complexity; b) obviate the need for configuration management.
* How do you diff filesystem images when there are unique PREFIXes in the paths?
A salt module would be fun to play around with.
How likely am I to volunteer to troubleshoot your unique statically-linked packages?
[deleted]
Python vs Julia – an example from machine learning
1. Where is the source for this benchmark?
2.http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org could be a bit more representative of broad-based algorithmic performance.
3. There are lots of Python libraries for application features other than handpicked algorithms. I would be interested to see benchmarks of the marshaling code in IJulia (IPython with Julia)
Free static page hosting on Google App Engine in minutes
From years back, there was a tool created called DryDrop[1] that allows you to publish static GAE sites via GitHub push.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/push-to-deploy (Git + .netrc)
Seems nice! How do you set up a custom domain name for it?
“Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, Use a Framework” They All Say
1. WordPress is an application with a plugin API. It is not a framework.
2. Writing a web application without a framework is a good learning experience. For anything but small-scale local learning experiences, the risks and costs of not working with a framework are significant. [It is probable that I, with my ego, would "do it wrong" and that a community of developers has arrived at a far superior solution.]
One of the best explanations for what advantages a framework offers over basically just writing your own framework I've found is in the Symfony2 Book: "Symfony2 versus Flat PHP". [1]
[1] http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/from_flat_php_to_symfony...
PEP 450: Adding A Statistics Module To The Standard Library
I think Pandas is a great candidate for inclusion in the stdlib if this ever happens - and hopefully, numpy/parts of scipy will also be thrown in :)
I think the idea is to include a small independent stats package not a full featured still developing third party. Any number of people need std dev easily and reliably available. If you need numpy on top of that, you know you do and can afford the effort.
For 99% of my work numpy and the associated compilation overhead is unneeded - fits my brain, fits my needs
So let's amortize the cost of compiling and/or installing fast binaries by only relying on plain Python.
It would be great if there was a natural progression (and/or compat shims) for porting from this new stdlib library to NumPy[Py] (and/or from LibreOffice). (e.g. "Is it called 'cummean'")?
I guess that's the point of the stats-battery - pure python stats with no / minimal cost to migrate to numpy e.g.
From stats import mean
...
from numpy import meanFunctional Programming with Python
Great deck about functional programming in Python. Also:
* `operator.attrgetter`, `getattr()`, `setattr()`, `object.__getattribute__` [1][2]
* `operator.itemgetter`, `object.__getitem__` [3][4]
* `collections.abc` [5][6]
[1] http://docs.python.org/2/library/operator.html#operator.attr...
[2] http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#object.__g...
[3] http://docs.python.org/2/library/operator.html#operator.item...
[4] http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html?#object.__...
[5] http://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collection...
wow, i love your presentation design, type and function :)
is this a reveal.js rendering of an IPython notebook ?
ipython nbconvert --to slides <notebook.ipynb>
</notebook.ipynb>PEP 8 Modernisation
The default wrapping in most tools disrupts the visual structure of the code,
making it more difficult to understand.
You think we would have gotten past the point of having to manually figure out "where should I break these lines for the best readability." Code is meant to be consumed by machines, and a machine should be capable of parsing the stuff, figuring out visual structure, and wrapping dynamically to account for window width and readable line-lengths in a way that preserves the visual structure.
I upvoted you for this - I think it's a really interesting idea.
Why can't my editor tokenize my code and then show it in the format I want? Why do I, as the programmer, have to worry about whether one whitespace convention works for you versus me, when you could just come up with whatever scheme you like and view code that way?
Funny, someone was just talking about 79 characters per line in regards to using soft tabs for editor display consistency, the other day.
http://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/1j7iv4/would_it_not_be...
These are useful for static code analysis and finding congruence with typesetting conventions:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8
Useful Unix commands for data science
The "Text Processing" category of this list of unix utilities is also helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_programs
BashReduce is a pretty cool application of many of these utilities.
The data visualization community needs its own Hacker News
It'd be really nice if there was a more centralized place to submit and discuss recent work. I usually end up posting my stuff to visualizing.org, visual.ly, and sometimes hn.
There generally isn't too much commenting going on though, despite generating a decent number of views. This makes sense - I only give feedback to a small percentage of things I see on the internet. I would like to interact with other designers more, but sending unsolicited comments/criticism via a tweet or an email doesn't seem appropriate most of the time.
I included a small note on the bottom of my last project "Have an idea for another graphic? Think I did something wrong? Hit me up! adam.r.pearce@gmail.com | @adamrpearce" which resulted in a couple of interesting email threads. None of those conversations really need to be private though.
/r/d3js , /r/visualization , /r/Infographics
schema.org/ > Thing > CreativeWork > { Article, Dataset, DataCatalog, MediaObject, and CollectionPage } may also be helpful.
Ask HN: Intermediate Python learning resources?
So I've completed Codecademy's course on Python, I have some experience fiddling with Flask and putting together random Python scripts. Generally, when I want to build something that I've never built before, I look up how to do it on Stackoverflow and manage to understand most of the things.
How can I take my knowledge to the next level?
Free learning resources are preferred. Hopefully ones you have used yourself when in my position.
Thanks!
I'm in a very similar position.
If you really like Codeacademy, there are non-track exercises that involve Python in the API section [0] and a couple of Python challenges [1][2] that aren't listed.
What I'm doing now:
* Solving exercises on Project Euler in Python. [3]
* Working through each example in the Python Cookbook[4]. It was just updated to the third edition.
* Watched Guido's Painless Python talks from a few years ago [5]. I found his concise explanations of language features really helpful.
Some things I intend to do:
* Finish working through Collective Intelligence [6]. The examples are written in Python.
* Work through Introduction to Algorithms [7]. The course uses Python.
* Read, understand and give a shot at extending Openstack [8] code.
-----
0: http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/apis
1: http://www.codecademy.com/courses/python-intermediate-en-NYX...
2: http://www.codecademy.com/courses/python-intermediate-en-VWi...
5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDgD9whDfEY
7: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Aren't Project Euler's exercises seem more likely maths exercises? It's kinda difficult for those who graduated from social sciences and tries to learn programming from scratch.
The Green Tea Press books are great; and free.
Think Python: How To Think Like a Computer Scientist http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html
Think Complexity: Exploring Complexity Science with Python : http://www.greenteapress.com/compmod/
Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers : http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/index.html
You can search announced, in progress, future, self-paced, and finished MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with class-central.com : http://www.class-central.com/search?q=python
Here are three resources for learning Python for Science :
http://scipy-lectures.github.io
https://github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes...
Ansible Simply Kicks Ass
> Doing this with Chef would probably mean chasing down a knife plugin for adding Linode support, and would simply require a full Chef stack (say hello to RabbitMQ, Solr, CouchDB and a gazillion smaller dependencies)
It is throwaway lines line that where you really need to be careful since, no, you don't need to RabbitMQ, solr, couchdb etc. You can just use chef-solo which can also be installed with a one liner (albeit running a remote bash script)
When comparing two products (especially in an obviously biased manner) you need to make sure you are 100% correct. Otherwise you weaken your case and comments like this one turn up.
True, though chef-solo is a local-only solution. Ansible manages to manage remote machines without that kind of setup, and can start managing the remotes without installing anything on them.
Install chef-solo on server.
scp locally dev'd (with vagrant ideally) cookbook to server
Run cookbook
3 steps that can easily be wrapped in a little script (which I know a large company does because I saw their presentation about it on confreaks. Sorry I cannot remember the name of the company or presentation but it was a chef related one).
Still not exactly killing it in terms of complexity. I would avoid comparing ansible to chef-solo in that respect and focus on bits where ansible has a clear (IMHO) win.
Having said that I should say that I have not used ansible and am basing this on what I have read about it.
You don't even need to do that. You can type `knife solo prepare root@my-server` and it will install chef-solo on that machine. Then type `knife solo cook root@my-server` and you're good to go.
Well damn, I have been doing it wrong. That is awesome to know though.
I wonder if anyone has done a http://todomvc.com/ equivalent for cfengine, puppet, chef, salt, ansible etc.
Something like a simple webserver running Apache with mod_xsendfile, Passenger, Ruby 2.0.0, postgreSQL and a few firewall tweaks (why yes, I AM mainly a ruby developer, why do you ask?)
https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint [generates] configuration sets for "Puppet or Chef or CFEngine 3."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_conf...
https://ops-school.readthedocs.org/en/latest/config_manageme...
Python-Based Tools for the Space Science Community
"OSX install has become a challenge. With the Enthought transition to Canopy we cannot figure out clean install directions for 3rd party packages and therefore can no longer recommend using EPD for SpacePy."
Um... use Anaconda? http://continuum.io/anaconda
The Python installation tool utilized to install different versions of Anaconda and component packages is called [conda](http://docs.continuum.io/conda/intro.html). [pythonbrew]( https://github.com/utahta/pythonbrew) in combination with [virtualenvwrapper](http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) is also great.
Big-O Algorithm Complexity Cheat Sheet
JSON API
In terms of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data , there are a number of standard (overlapping) URI-based schema for describing data with structured attributes:
* http://schema.org/docs/full.html
* http://schema.rdfs.org/all.json
* http://schema.rdfs.org/all.ttl (Turtle RDF Triples)
* http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld/
* http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/json-ld-api/
* http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/ Linked Data Platform TR defines a RESTful API standard
* http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/MarmottaProposal implements LDP 1.0 Draft and SPARQL 1.1
Norton Ghost discontinued
Would love to hear ideas on the best replacement from other HNers.
Open-source utilities running from livecd.
dd if=/dev/sda bs=16777216 | gzip -c9 > /path/to/sda.img.gz
dd if=/dev/sda bs=16777216 | pv -c -W | gzip -c9 | pv -c -W > /path/to/sda.img.gz
pv -c -W /path/to/sda.img.gz | gzip -cd | pv -c -W | dd bs=16777216 of=/dev/sdx
If you want a compressed image which you can mount read-only without uncompressing (e.g. if you want to be able to reach into the backup and pull out a single file or directory), you can pipe the dump to a FIFO and then use the pseudo-file feature of mksquashfs [1]. E.g. something like this (commands not tested, there may be typos):
mkfifo sda.fifo
echo 'sda.img f 444 root root cat sda.fifo' > sda.pf
dd if=/dev/sda bs=16777216 > sda.fifo &
mkdir empty
mksquashfs empty sda.squashfs -pf sda.pf
mount -o ro,loop sda.squashfs /mnt
I recommend reading the man pages and playing around with these utilities in a Virtualbox VM with a small disk.
Of course, this approach doesn't pay any attention to filesystems. Which means it works with Windows partitions (unlike LVM or btrfs snapshots). But there are limitations; it reads and stores "empty" space not occupied by files (I recommend making a large file full of zeroes beforehand to make the empty space compress better), restoring to a smaller disk is difficult if not impossible, restoring to a larger disk requires you to resize manually afterwards if you want to use the extra space.
[1] It's a little easier conceptually to make a squashfs directly from an image file, but that approach requires you to store the image file, which requires temp space equal to the size of the disk you're backing up. The pseudo-file approach has a benefit of not needing temporary space equal to the size of the disk being backed up, you just need enough space for the compressed result.
That misses much of what Ghost does. Ghost is file-system-aware, so it's not a byte-for-byte cloner. It can copy one volume to a large volume, and vice versa.
You can accomplish the same thing in Linux, of course, but it requires a lot more than just "dd".
http://clonezilla.org supports http://partclone.org/ , http://www.partimage.org/ , dd, and ntfsclone.
Docs: https://docs.nerf.studio/en/latest/
Src: https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/nerfstudio/
Draft: Neural_Radiance_Fields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Neural_Radiance_Fields :
> A Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a method based on deep learning for reconstructing a three-dimensional representation of a scene from two-dimensional images. It is a type of generative model that can create 3D scenes from a set of 2D images.[1] The NeRF model can learn the scene geometry, camera poses, and the reflectance properties of objects in a scene, which allows it to render new views of the scene from novel viewpoints.